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Hendrik Boom

From Gambit wiki

Born in Amsterdam in 1946, immigrated to Canada in 1952. Encountered Lisp way back in the 60's, learned it from the Lisp 1.5 programmer's manual, which is still on my bookshelf soemwhere. I implemented it, somewhat, on an !BM 1620, though what you can do with Lisp on a machine with memory for only about 3600 Lisp cells I'm not sure of. There was one bug I never could find...

I spent a long while implementing Algol 68. Phd. from the University of Waterloo, 1974. I've been on faculty at Northeastern University and COncordia. I've worked in industry implementing network protocols and providing the back end programming language support for Visual Edge's UIMX.

I got excited about Scheme from Steele's thesis in the 70's. Back then Scheme was still really a Lisp with substantial conceptual differences.

It's changed a lot since. A lot of the old primitive function names have changed, making it almost a foreign language to the native Lisp speaker. I haven't kept up, but it's clear if I do anything in the Lispish area, the proper platform to use nowadays is Scheme.

I'd still like to read the new x86 code generator for Gambit, whether it's finished or not, mostly from technical interest. I've written a few code generators myself, but the x86 instruction set makes very little sense to me. It's such a weird mix of regularity and irregularity; it's as bad as a natural language!