I would guess, the paper cares what the language looks like since it's about Lisp being real-time.
Lisp has been dubbed as a "symbolic processing language" since its early days, since MacCarthy used that language in some papers.*
Basically it means the ability to juggle complex data structures that can
represent formulas; e.g. solving algebraic equations (something easily hacked up in Lisp) is an example of symbolic processing.
This is entirely relevant to the topic because the dynamic allocation used in symbolic processing presents challenges to real-time processing, like garbage collection pauses, and whatnot. What if you want asynchronous interrupts to be able to allocate cons cells and other objects?
In a Lisp program, memory-allocating expressions casually appear throughout a program. Something like (list a b c), if we translate it to C, would call a malloc-like routine three times. Some people doing some kinds of embedded work even today eschew dynamic allocation.
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* Like: Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine. Memo 8, Artificial Intelligence Project, RLE and MIT Computation Center, March 13, 1959, 19 pages. https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/6096
I would guess, the paper cares what the language looks like since it's about Lisp being real-time.
Lisp has been dubbed as a "symbolic processing language" since its early days, since MacCarthy used that language in some papers.*
Basically it means the ability to juggle complex data structures that can represent formulas; e.g. solving algebraic equations (something easily hacked up in Lisp) is an example of symbolic processing.
This is entirely relevant to the topic because the dynamic allocation used in symbolic processing presents challenges to real-time processing, like garbage collection pauses, and whatnot. What if you want asynchronous interrupts to be able to allocate cons cells and other objects?
In a Lisp program, memory-allocating expressions casually appear throughout a program. Something like (list a b c), if we translate it to C, would call a malloc-like routine three times. Some people doing some kinds of embedded work even today eschew dynamic allocation.
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* Like: Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine. Memo 8, Artificial Intelligence Project, RLE and MIT Computation Center, March 13, 1959, 19 pages. https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/6096