The Embeddable Common Lisp project is an implementation of the Common-Lisp language that aims to comply with the ANSI Common-Lisp standard. The first ECL implementations were developed by Giuseppe Attardi’s who produced an interpreter and compiler fully conformant with the Common-Lisp as reported in Steele:84. ECL derives itself mostly from Kyoto Common-Lisp, an implementation developed at the Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences (RIMS), Kyoto University, with the cooperation of Nippon Data General Corporation. The main developers of Kyoto Common-Lisp were Taiichi Yuasa and Masami Hagiya, of the Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences, at Kyoto University.
We must thank Giuseppe Attardi, Yuasa and Hagiya and Juan Jose Garcia Ripoll for their wonderful work with preceding implementations and for putting them in the Public Domain under the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation. Without them this product would have never been possible.
This document is an update of the original ECL documentation, which was based in part on the material in [see Yuasa:85]
The following people or organizations must be credited for support in the development of Kyoto Common-Lisp: Prof. Reiji Nakajima at RIMS, Kyoto University; Nippon Data General Corporation; Teruo Yabe; Toshiyasu Harada; Takashi Suzuki; Kibo Kurokawa; Data General Corporation; Richard Gabriel; Daniel Weinreb; Skef Wholey; Carl Hoffman; Naruhiko Kawamura; Takashi Sakuragawa; Akinori Yonezawa; Etsuya Shibayama; Hagiwara Laboratory; Shuji Doshita; Takashi Hattori.
William F. Schelter improved KCL in several areas and developed Austin Kyoto Common-Lisp (AKCL). Many ideas and code from AKCL have been incorporated in Embeddable Common Lisp.
The following is the partial list of contributors to ECL: Taiichi Yuasa and Masami Hagiya (KCL), William F. Schelter (Dynamic loader, conservative GC), Giuseppe Attardi (Top-level, trace, stepper, compiler, CLOS, multithread), Marcus Daniels (Linux port) Cornelis van der Laan (FreeBSD port) David Rudloff (NeXT port) Dan Stanger, Don Cohen, and Brian Spilsbury.
We have to thank for the following pieces of software that have helped in the development of Embeddable Common Lisp
For the Cltl2-compliance test
For the ANSI-compliance test
For the ANSI-compliant LOOP macro.
The Embeddable Common Lisp project also owes a lot to the people who have tested this program and contributed with suggestions, error messages and documentation: Eric Marsden, Hannu Koivisto, Jeff Bowden and Yuto Hayamizu, Bo Yao and others whose name we may have omitted.