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T



I was involved in the T project. I can give you its history, in a rambling,
first-person way.

Around 1981-1982, the Yale CS dept., which had a strong AI group led by Roger
Schank, hired undergraduate Jonathan Rees to implement a new Lisp for their
research programming. Jonathan, I and Dan Weld (now a prof. at U Washington)
were the three people at Yale that had discovered the early Sussman/Steele
"lambda" papers, including Guy's seminal master's thesis on Rabbit, the first
Scheme compiler. Dan was a college senior; Jonathan & I were juniors. Alan
Perlis, the soul of the department, had just discovered functional
programming, and was running a graduate seminar covering early FP languages
such as Hope & Miranda & Scheme. The three of us managed to sleaze our way
into this grad class, where we met each other.

Some context: Common Lisp did not exist (the effort was just getting
underway). MIT Scheme did not exist. Scheme was a couple of AI Lab tech
reports and a master's thesis. We're talking the tiniest seed crystal
imaginable, here. There was immense experience in the lisp community on
optimising compiled implementations of dynamically-scoped languages -- this,
to such an extent, that it was a widely held opinion at the time that "lexical
scope is interesting, *theoretically*, but it's inefficient to implement;
dynamic scope is the fast choice." I'm not kidding. To name two examples, I
heard this, on different occasions, from Richard Stallman (designer &
implementor of emacs lisp) and Richard Fateman (prof. at Berkeley, and the
principal force behind franz lisp, undoubtedly the most important lisp
implementation built in the early Vax era -- important because it was
delivered and it worked). I asked RMS when he was implementing emacs lisp why
it was dynamically scoped and his exact reply was that lexical scope was too
inefficient. So my point here is that even to people who were experts in the
area of lisp implementation, in 1982 (and for years afterward, actually),
Scheme was a radical, not-at-all-accepted notion. And *outside* the Lisp/AI
community... well, languages with GC were definitely not acceptable. (Contrast
with the perl & Java era in which we live. It is no exaggeration, thanks to
perl, to say in 2001 that *billions* of dollars of services have been rolled
out to the world on top of GC'd languages.)

Jonathan had spent the previous year on leave from Yale working at MIT. The
important thing that was happening was that 32-bit machines were coming out,
with 32-bit address spaces -- *big* address spaces. A lot of the existing
language technology in the AI community had been developed for the PDP-11
(16-bit machine) and, more importantly, the workhorse PDP-10 and -20. I loved
the "ten," may I add. It had an instruction set that fit onto a single page of
large type, and was just cool. That ISA was a hacker's dream; you could play
all kinds of fun games with it. For example, there was a famous hack that
provided a means of (1) removing a cons cell from a freelist, (2) updating the
freelist, and (3) branching if the freelist was exhausted to the GC... in *one
instruction*. The PDP-10 was a 36-bit machine, with an 18-bit word-addressed
address space. Note what this means: a cons cell fit into a single word. There
are many who claim that the -10 was the world's first lisp machine. I agree
with them.

There were two extremely good, mature, highly optimised lisp implementations
for the -10, one "East Coast" (Maclisp, from MIT) and one "West coast"
(Interlisp, from Stanford & Xerox PARC). You could also program the -10 in
a beautiful, roughly-C-level language from CMU, called Bliss. I see C and I
remember Bliss, and I could weep.

The problem was the limited, 18-bit address spaces of the -10's. Programmers
were blowing them out. When DEC shipped the Vax & Motorola 68000s began to
show up in Sun & Apollo workstations, people realised that the 32-bit address
space of these architectures was a discontinuous shift in technology, and that
language implementation on these machines was going to be similarly
discontinuous. For example, with a really big address space, you wanted to
fundamentally change your GC technology and data representations.

Berkeley was a big player making the Vax happen in universities, by getting
the ARPA contract to build Berkeley Unix for the Vax (which effort
subsequently spun off into Sun, courtesy Bill Joy). Part of this effort was a
lisp for the Vax, franz lisp, built under Fateman's guidance. Franz was a
design more in the vein of Maclisp than Interlisp, enough so as to allow the
porting of Macsyma (Fateman's interest) to the Vax. Franz also showed
fundamental influences from a little-known lisp done at harvard.

MIT responded to the Vax by kicking off the NIL project. NIL stood for "New
Implementation of Lisp." Jonathan was part of this project during his year
away from Yale. It was a really, really good effort, but in the end, was
crippled by premature optimisation -- it was very large, very aggressive, very
complex. Example: they were allocating people to write carefully hand-tuned
assembly code for the bignum package before the general compiler was written.
The NIL project was carried out by top people (err... I recall Jonl White &
George Carrette being principals). But it never got delivered. It was finished
years later than projected, by which time it was mostly irrelevant. (This has
happened to me. It's a bitter, bitter experience. I fashionably decried
premature optimisation in college without really understanding it until I once
committed an act of premature opt so horrific that I can now tell when it is
going to rain by the twinges I get in the residual scar tissue. Now I
understand premature optimisation.) The genesis & eventual failure of this
kind of project is always clearly visible (in hindsight) in the shibboleths of
the early discussions. One key tip-off phrase is always something of the form,
"We'll throw out all the old cruft, start over fresh, and just Do Things
Right." (This, unfortunately, is not a useful observation, because that
strategy sometimes does pay off, hugely. It's just very risky.)

Jonathan worked on NIL for a year, then came back to Yale for his senior year,
where he was hired by the CS dept. to implement a new Lisp. He made a
*radical* decision: he was going to do an optimising, native-code *Scheme*
system. He chose to name it T. This was a great name for a couple of
reasons. It was short & simple, of course. It fit in with Yale CS culture, as
there was a history of programs developed there that had single-letter names:
e, c, z & u. (These were a locally-grown family of sophisticated screen
editors that were rougly comparable to, but quite different from, emacs.)
Finally, if you're a lisp hacker, then you know that NIL is the lisp false
constant... and T is the canonical true constant. So "T is not NIL."

Let me repeat here what a radical decision it was to go and build a Scheme.
The *only* Scheme implementation that had *ever* been built at this point was
the research prototype Steele had done for his Masters. *All* serious Lisps in
production use at that time were dynamically scoped. No one who hadn't
carefully read the Rabbit thesis believed lexical scope would fly; even the
few people who *had* read it were taking a bit of a leap of faith that this
was going to work in serious production use -- the difference between theory &
practice is, uh, larger in practice than in theory.

(For example, the other big MIT implementation effort, Zetalisp for the Lisp
Machine, kept dynamic scoping, but allowed the compiler to sort of break the
semantics, and then, in response to Scheme, threw lexical closures into the
mix as a fairly kludged-up special form.)

(The Europeans working on early systems like ML in Edinburgh probably find all
this American early-80's thrashing & confusion over scoping discipline and
implementation strategy incredibly clueless. Sorry 'bout that.)

Besides Roger Schank, the other person who made the resource committment to
hire Jonathan to develop T was John O'Donnell, who later went on to be a
principal Multiflow, the company that commercialised VLIW
architecture/compiler technology that Josh Fisher spun out of Yale in 1983. I
suspect Alan Perlis probably had a hand in the decision, as well, though I
don't really know. Committing funds to allow Jonathan to set out to (try to)
build a production-quality Scheme implementation was pretty brave, up there
with Jonathan's decision to try.

Jonathan brought back to Yale from the NIL project a raft of really excellent
implementation technology -- primarily the fundamental data representations
that were carefully honed for the new-generation machine architectures, using
tag bits in the low bits of the datum. E.g., if you made the fixnum tag "000",
then you could add & subtract fixnums in a single instruction, with no
tag-hacking overhead; you could multiply with a single pre-shift and divide
with a single post-shift. This was a big improvement over Maclisp's required
boxing of fixnums, and the supporting cruft that made that all work (in my
opinion). Also, since the Vax was *byte* addressable, you could strip off the
type tag of a cons-cell datum simply by adjusting the constant offset in the
addressing mode. I.e., cons cells were represented by the double-word-aligned
address of the two-word chunk of memory where the cell's car & cdr fields
lived. Double-word-aligning the memory block means the low three bits of its
address are always zero, that is, not needed. So the three low bits of the
address were used for the type tags. So suppose we use "010" (decimal 2) for
the type tag. You could take the cdr of the pair in register r7 with a single
instruction: load r8, r7[4-2] where the "4" gets you 1 word (4 bytes) into the
pair (the cdr field) and the "-2" corrects for the type tag. I.e., you could
strip off the type tag with *zero* run-time penalty. Nice! The representations
for closures and stack frames were also very clever.

Jonathan had been burned by the NIL project's failure to complete, so he was
very careful about avoiding premature optimisation. So he blasted out a quick
& dirty prototype implementation just to get something up and running. (I
think he wrote this in Maclisp, and as I recall, he called it "cheapy.") After
that, all development of future implementations was done in T -- T 2 was
implemented with T 1.

T 2 was the first really good implementation, with all of the tricks I've
described above. It ran on Vaxes & 68000's, which had also just come out.
It was solid enough to be a serious system that had real clients who depended
on it.

About this time, roughly, Sussman's group was starting the development path
that eventually led to MIT Scheme, and the (intertwined) pedagogical path that
led to Sussman & Abelson's book, *Structure and Interpretation of Computer
Programs*. The Lisp Machine effort had also spun out into Symbolics & LMI,
causing Maclisp to spawn Zetalisp & Flavors, which in turn had a lot of
influence on Common Lisp and Common Lisp's object system, CLOS. But I'm
digressing. Back to Yale.

T also used a pretty cool GC. Maclisp on the -10 had used a mark&sweep GC (one
version of which famously "ran in the register set," though that is another
story), encoding type information using a "BIBOP" scheme -- all objects
were boxed, and segregated by type into pages. Hence the high bits of the
object's address could be used to index into a page table to tell you what
kind of thing lived in that page. This was well tuned for tight-memory systems
like the -10. With large address spaces, though, you wanted to use stop&copy,
because with stop&copy you only pay to copy the live data; you don't pay a
cost proportional to the amount of garbage. This is well suited to the big
heaps you can allocate on a 32-bit machine. Most stop&copy collectors almost
universally implement the the Cheney algorithm, which does a breadth-first
search of the heap. But BFS is not so great for memory locality -- it scatters
topologically close data structures all over the heap as it copies. Not good.
T used a lesser-known (but quite simple -- the research paper describing it is
about 2 pages long) algorithm due to Clark that implements *depth*-first
traversal. (Just as the Cheney algorithm cleverly uses the existing heap data
structures to provide the BFS search queue, Clark's uses the heap to provide
the search stack.) Depth-first search means that if you GC a linked list, the
GC zips down the spine of the list before turning its attention to the
elements of the list, so those "spine" cells wind up laid out sequentially in
memory. Your list turns into a vector! (sorta) This *rocks* for locality.
However,
  - T dropped this algorithm in the late 80's for the classic BFS algorithm.
    David Kranz (who will appear in this tale shortly) told me at that point
    that he'd made the switch because the copy phase of the BFS algorithm had 
    slightly faster constant factors

  - That standard religion I just gave you about "stop&copy only pays
    for the good stuff, but in mark&sweep you have to pay for the garbage,
    as well"? It's not true. We all believed it for decades. But Norman
    Ramsey at harvard has cleverly shown that you can implement mark&sweep 
    with *exactly* the same asymptotic costs as stop&copy. This is good
    news especially for tight-memory systems with homogenous heap data.
    Norman's observation is really obvious and simple; hardly an impressive
    result when you see it. Except, uh, that it eluded *everyone else* for
    *decades.* And not because people didn't care; GC has received a lot of
    attention from researchers. There's a lesson there.

I've never seen a depth-first collector anywhere but T. By the way, the
T garbage collector was written in T. This is also a slightly amazing feat.
It was achieved by virtue of the fact that T was native-code compiled, and
the garbage collector was written by the compiler authors. They knew *exactly*
how the compiler would handle their source, so they could carefully code the
collector so that it would not need to heap allocate while running.

(That's not as simple as it sounds. It's not as easy as simply writing your
code and never calling malloc() or invoking a "new" method. It's tied up in
the treatment of lambda. Good Scheme compilers use a range of implementations
for the lambdas in the program, depending upon what they can determine about
the lambdas at compile time -- how they're used, to where they are passed, the
relationship between the uses and the definition points, etc. Some lambdas
just evaporate into nothing. Some lambdas turn into control-flow join points
with associated register/variable bindings. Some lambdas turn into stack
frames. But some lambdas cause heap allocation to produce general closures. So
you have to understand how the compiler is going to handle every lambda you
write. And the fundamental skeleton of a Scheme program is built on lambda.)

Another implementation feat of T's was that it allowed interrupts between
*any* two instructions of user code. This placed a pretty intense burden on
the compiler, enough so that, of all the Scheme implementations of which I'm
aware, T is *unique* in this respect. To understand why this is hard in the
presence of garbage collection, you can read a paper I wrote on the subject ten
years later, "Atomic heap transactions and fine-grain interrupts," found at
    http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~shivers/citations.html#heap
(You don't have to be a heavy-duty lambda-calculus wizard to read this
paper; it's written to be comprehensible to general hackers.) T also allowed 
you to write interrupt (Unix signal) handlers in T, which was pretty pleasant.

There was more to T than implementation technology; there was also a lot of
beautiful language design happening. Jonathan seized the opportunity to make a
complete break with backwards compatibility in terms of the runtime library
and even the names chosen. Somewhere in the T 2 effort, Kent Pitman, another
Lisp wizard, came down to Yale from MIT. He and Jonathan poured an immense
amount of design effort into the language, and it was just really, really
*clean*. Small (but difficult) things: they chose a standard set of lexemes
and a regular way of assembling them into the names of the standard
procedures, so that you could easily remember or reconstruct names when you
were coding. (I have followed this example in the development of the SRFIs
I've done for the Scheme community. It is not an easy task.)

Larger, deeper things: they designed a beautiful object system that was
integrated into the assignment machinery -- just as Common Lisp's SETF lets
you assign using accessors, e.g., in Common Lisp
    (setf (car x) y)
is equivalent to
    (rplaca x y)
in T,
    (set! (car x) y)
was shorthand for
    ((setter car) x y)
Accessor functions like CAR handled "generic functions" or "messages"
like SETTER -- CAR returned the SET-CAR! procedure when sent the SETTER
message. The compiler was capable of optimising this into the single
Vax store instruction that implements the SET-CAR! operation, but the
semantic machinery was completely general -- you could define your own
accessor procedures, give them SETTER methods, and then use them in SET! 
forms.

(This turned out to be very nice in the actual implementation of the compiler.
The AST was a tree of objects, connected together in both directions --
parents knew their children; children also had links to their parents.
If the optimiser changed the else-part of an if-node N with something
like this
    (set! (if-node:else n) new-child)
which was really
    ((setter if-node:else) n new-child)
the if-node:else's SETTER method did a lot of work for you -- it disconnected
the old child, installed NEW-CHILD as N's else field, and set NEW-CHILD's
parent field to be N. So you could never forget to keep all the links
consistent; it was all handled for you just by the single SET! assignment.)

Around the time that Kent went back to MIT, new grad student Norman Adams
hooked up w/Jonathan. T 2 and its compiler TC, was produced after about a year
of really hard, focussed work on the part of Jonathan, Kent and Norman. I
graduated from Yale and went off to CMU to be a grad student in AI. Jonathan
started to think about the next compiler.

During my first year as a grad student, Jonathan met Forrest Baskett, who was
the director of one of the top industrial CS labs, DEC's Western Research
Lab, where a lot of the important RISC work was done (e.g., you could
argue that David Wall's work on interprocedural register allocation there
killed the architectural feature of overlapping register-set stacks that came
out of Berkeley and wound up in the SPARC). Forrest liked Jonathan, and
invited him to bring a team out to WRL for the summer to implement T for the
machine they were building (an amazing-for-the-time RISC called the Titan).
Jonathan's team was himself, Norman, Jim Philbin, David Kranz, Richard Kelsey,
John Lamping and myself. Lamping was at Stanford, I was at CMU, the rest were
grad students at Yale (except Jonathan, who was an employee at Yale).

This brings us to the summer of 1984. The mission was to build the world's
most highly-optimising Scheme compiler. We wanted to compete with C and
Fortran. The new system was T3, and the compiler was to be called Orbit. We
all arrived at WRL and split up responsibility for the compiler. Norman was
going to do the assembler. Philbin was going to handle the runtime (as I
recall). Jonathan was project leader and (I think) wrote the linker. Kranz was
to do the back end. Kelsey, the front end. I had passed the previous semester
at CMU becoming an expert on data-flow analysis, a topic on which I completely
grooved. All hot compilers do DFA. It is necessary for all the really cool
optimisations, like loop-invariant hoisting, global register allocation,
global common subexpression elimination, copy propagation, induction-variable
elimination. I knew that no Scheme or Lisp compiler had ever provided these
hot optimisations. I was burning to make it happen. I had been writing 3D
graphics code in T, and really wanted my floating-point matrix multiplies to
get the full suite of DFA optimisation. Build a DFA module for T, and we would
certainly distinguish ourselves from the pack. So when we divided up the
compiler, I told everyone else to back off and loudly claimed DFA for my own.
Fine, everyone said. You do the DFA module. Lamping signed up to do it with
me.

Lamping and I spent the rest of the summer failing. Taking trips to the
Stanford library to look up papers. Hashing things out on white boards.
Staring into space. Writing little bits of experimental code. Failing. Finding
out *why* no one had ever provided DFA optimisation for Scheme. In short, the
fundamental item the classical data-flow analysis algorithms need to operate
is not available in a Scheme program. It was really depressing. I was making
more money than I'd ever made in my life ($600/week). I was working with
*great* guys on a cool project. I had never been to California before, so I
was discovering San Francisco, my favorite city in the US and second-favorite
city in the world. Silicon Valley in 1984 was beautiful, not like the crowded
strip-mall/highway hell hole it is today. Every day was perfect and beautiful
when I biked into work. I got involved with a gorgeous redhead. And every day,
I went in to WRL, failed for 8 hours, then went home.

It was not a good summer.

At the end of the summer, I slunk back to CMU with my tail between my legs,
having contributed not one line of code to Orbit.

Everyone else, however, completed. The compiler wasn't finished by summer's
end, but it was completed the following year at Yale. And it was the world's
most highly optimising Scheme compiler (even though it did not do data-flow
analysis), a record it held for a *long* time -- perhaps ten years?

It was also a massive validation of a thesis Steele had argued for his
Master's, which was that CPS was a great intermediate representation for a
compiler. Orbit was totally hard-core about this -- the first thing the
compiler did was translate the user program into CPS, and that was the
standard form on which the compiler operated for the rest of its execution.
And it turned out this approach scaled up from Rabbit to a production,
native-code compiler very successfully.

David Kranz took the work he'd done on the back end, which was a very complex
piece of code that did a lot of sophisticated analysis on data
representations, register allocation, and, in particular, lambdas, and turned
it into his PhD thesis. Orbit produced code that actually beat the Pascal
implementation used by Apollo (a Sun-class workstation company) to implement
the *operating system* on that workstation; that was a huge coup. David then
went to MIT, where he brought his compiler technology to Bert Halstead's
parallel lisp project, before hooking up with Steve Ward to do the research
project that turned into Curl. When Ward spun Curl out into a company,
Halstead & Kranz became the senior technical guys there.

Let's call Kranz's dissertation PhD #1. It's title was *An Optimising Compiler
for Scheme,* which I took to be an in-reference to William Wulf's seminal
Bliss compiler, described in a book (my copy is signed) titled simply *The
Design of an Optimising Compiler*. Wulf's Bliss compiler was a model up to
which we all looked -- it held the title "world's most highly optimising
compiler" for a while.

(Remember Bliss? Just to add more cross-links, Wulf had left CMU about then
and spun out a company, Tartan Labs, to commercialise this compiler technology
for C. He took Guy Steele with him, who had just finished wrapping up leading
the Common Lisp definition while on the faculty at CMU. Tartan tanked, Wulf
moved on to a senior position at UVa & is now a big wheel at the national
science-policy level, e.g. leading National Academy inquiries into
counter-terrorism technology. Steele went to Thinking Machines, and then
threw his language-development skills behind the Java effort at Sun.)

Kranz' diss is a Yale Computer Science Dept. tech report. I would say it
is required reading for anyone interested in serious compiler technology for
functional programming languages. You could probably order or download one
from a web page at a url that I'd bet begins with http://www.cs.yale.edu/.

Richard Kelsey took his front end, which was a very aggressive CPS-based
optimiser, and extended it all the way down to the ground to produce a
complete, second compiler, which he called "TC" for the "Transformational
Compiler." His approach was simply to keep transforming the program from one
simple, CPS, lambda language to an even simpler one, until the language was so
simple it only had 16 variables... r1 through r15, at which time you could
just kill the lambdas and call it assembler. It is a beautiful piece of work,
and, like Kranz's dissertation, required reading for anyone who wants to do
compilers for functional programming languages. It had a big influence on
Andrew Appel, at Princeton, who subsequently adopted a lot of the ideas in it
when he and Dave MacQueen's group at Bell Labs built the SML/NJ compiler for
SML; Andrew described this in the book he subsequently wrote on that compiler,
*Compiling With Continuations.* However, unlike the SML/NJ compiler, Kelsey's
CPS-based compiler compiled code that used a run-time stack for procedure
calls. He actually describes front ends in his diss for standard procedural
"non-lambda" languages such as Basic.

So the lineage of the CPS-as-compiler-IR thesis goes from Steele's Rabbit
compiler through T's Orbit to SML/NJ. At which point Sabry & Felleisen at Rice
published a series of very heavy-duty papers dumping on CPS as a
representation and proposing an alternate called A-Normal Form. ANF has been
the fashionable representation for about ten years now; CPS is out of favor.
This thread then sort of jumps tracks over to the CMU ML community, where it
picks up the important typed-intermediate-language track and heads to Cornell,
and Yale, but I'm not going to follow that now. However, just to tell you
where I am on this issue, I think the whole movement from CPS to ANF is a bad
idea (though Sabry & Felleisen's technical observations and math are as
rock solid as one would expect from people of their caliber).

Let's call Kelsey's dissertation PhD #2.

Kelsey subsequently spent time as a prof at Northeastern, then left for NEC's
prestige lab in Princeton, where he worked on the Kali distributed system. He
also got set down precisely on paper something all the CPS people knew at some
intuitive level: that the whole "SSA" revolution in the classical compiler
community was essentially a rediscovery of CPS. (Harrumph.) NEC Princeton went
on to accumulate a very impressive collection of Scheme/ML hackers: Stephen
Weeks & Andrew Wright from Rice, Kevin Lang (who built a little known but
quite beautiful, elegant, free and portable object-oriented Scheme called
Oaklisp), Kelsey, Jim Philbin, Henry Cetjin, and Jeff Siskind. When NEC
Princeton became an insane toxic place, Kelsey, like almost everyone else in
that previous list, jumped out into startup land, where he did a startup with
Rees & an MIT alumn, Patrick Sobalvarro, who achieved some early fame for work
on GC. That startup tanked in the dotcom meltdown last year, and Kelsey's
now on his second startup.

Norman Adams turned his assembler into a master's degree. It also was a cool
piece of software. His assembler didn't take a linear text stream; the
compiler handed it a *graph structure*. It serialised the graph on its own to
minimise the spans of the jump instructions, and had other neat features
(e.g., it was actually a portable framework for building assemblers). Then he
took his Masters and bailed out to Tektronix, where he developed a very
high-performance Scheme implementation for the Motorola 88000 called "screme,"
and then went to Xerox PARC, where he worked on ubiquitous computing and a
Scheme implementation called SchemeXeroX (a joke on "Team Xerox") with Pavel
Curtis. He left Xerox at the beginning of the dotcom boom and was early in at
the startup company Ariba, which is why (1) Ariba's big product had a
configuration system that is a Scheme built in Java and (2) he's a rich
dude.

Lamping's story is perhaps the strangest. He went back to Stanford, and got
involved in a very arcane, theoretical problem called optimal lambda
reduction, which he completely solved for his PhD. This is an achievement of
considerable note because pointy-headed theoretical semanticists had been
struggling to crack this problem for a long time in Europe. They'd been
struggling so hard, in fact, that they really seemed... annoyed when this
hacker from Stanford just sat down and solved the problem. John seemed to be
completely unqualified to solve the problem, bringing nothing to it but, uh,
brains. There was, for example, a snooty French paper that sort of dismissed
Lamping as an "autodidact," before proceeding to build (with, let me be
careful to note, proper credit given to John) on his work. So Lamping has thus
been permanently saddled with this hilarious title/term, by those who know &
like him. He'll never live it down. John Lamping, autodidact.

John subsequently went to Xerox PARC, where he and Gregor Kiczales made a team
working on a wide array of interesting programming-language problems, of which
"Aspect-Oriented Programming" is the most well known. Again, the story here
departs from T, so I won't pursue it. For the same reason, we will not call
John's dissertation "PhD #3" -- it wasn't really connected to his work on the
T project.

About three years after the summer at WRL, I *finally* figured out how to do
data-flow analysis for Scheme, which ended a long, pretty unhappy period in my
life. I officially switched from being an AI student to being a PL student,
picked up Peter Lee as a co-advisor (since my original advisor, Allen Newell,
while certainly the greatest scholar I've ever personally known, was not a PL
guy), and wrote it all up for *my* dissertation. This we can call PhD #3.

By the way, I'll add that the deepest and most powerful part of my diss, in my
opinion, is the part (a) about which no one seems to know and (b) which is on
the shakiest theoretical ground: environment reflow analysis. I would surely
love it if some interested character one day takes that piece of my diss and
really takes it someplace.

Jim Philbin, like Kelsey, also went to NEC, where he built an operating system
tuned for functional programming languages, STING (or perhaps it was spelled
"STNG" -- in any event it was pronounced "sting"). He built it in T, of
course, and one could see that it had its roots in his work on T3.
(Implementing the runtime for a functional language, in some sense, requires
you to implement a little virtual OS on top of the real, underlying OS.) Call
that PhD #4. Jim subsequently left Scheme, to do parallel processor & systems
work with Kai Li at Princeton.

Jonathan went to MIT as a graduate student, where he worked with Gerry Sussman
and David Gifford. After working on a series of interesting problems, Jonathan
also wrote his dissertation on an operating system for functional languages,
where you could use language safety as the fundamental protection mechanism.
Call that PhD #5. Then he got interested in entomology (bugs, I mean -- real
bugs, not computer bugs), did a post-doc in Europe, then came back to the US
and has sort of bounced between pursuing research topics that are as radical
and unusual as T was in 1982 & startup companies.

(Jonathan also wrote his dissertation *in Scheme* as well as *about* Scheme.
He built a little word processor for his diss in Scheme called "markup" that
allowed you to write standard text, interspersed with commands that were
delimited with curly braces. (Hmm. Text and commands in curly braces. Sound
familiar?) Commands were defined in Scheme; the markup processor had multiple
back-ends, such as HTML & PostScript. Scott Draves later extended markup for
*his* dissertation on partial-evaluation and high-performance graphics
rendering at CMU.)

I think that covers the entire T team. It is interesting to note that *five*
dissertation-level chunks of work (and one Master's-level chunk) came out of a
single summer project.

I've spent a fair amount of time discussing T's implementation technology.
However, it is also worth study as a language *design*, and here, Jonathan
is the single greatest influence. T was, principally, his baby. It was
quite a beautiful design.

When the risc revolution happened, Orbit was ported to the late-80's risc
processors: MIPS & SPARC. This is when the Clark GC was ripped out and
replaced with the Cheney collector. At CMU, I ported Orbit to an IBM precursor
of their POWER architecture, called the ROMP or the RT/PC.

One of the limiting factors of Orbit was the complexity of the back end. It
was documented very well by Kranz' diss, and it was very sophisticated, but it
was also a big mess of code. Out of a reaction to this complexity was born
Scheme 48 -- when Kelsey came to Northeastern as a prof, Jonathan was still at
MIT; he and Jonathan built Scheme 48 together. Its first use was on an
autonomous robot system that Jonathan had gotten involved with at Cornell. The
name was intended to reflect the idea that the implementation should be so
clear and simple that you could believe the system could have been written in
48 hours (or perhaps, when S48 got complex enough, this was altered to "could
have been *read* in 48 hours"). Scheme 48 had very little technical overlap
w/T3 and Orbit -- no native code compiler, no object system, no CPS IR. Its
innovations were its module system, the language in which its VM was defined
("pre-scheme"), and its stack-management technology. These were all
interesting technical bits. The stack was managed not by push & pop, but by
push & a generational gc. I believe Kelsey wrote a paper on this and its
advantages. The module system was somewhat like SML's, but allowed modular
macros and had another fairly cool feature: when you defined a module, clauses
let you specify which files held the module's source. But *other* clauses let
you specify which "reader" procedure to use to translate the character stream
in the files to the s-expression tree handed to the compiler. So you could
handle files with different concrete syntax -- R5RS syntax, scsh syntax, S48
syntax, PLT Scheme syntax, guile syntax, perhaps an infix syntax (as is so
often discussed). That eliminated an annoying, low-level but persistent
barrier to sharing code across different implementations of Scheme.

Pre-scheme was quite interesting. Kelsey published a paper on it, as well, I
believe. It was Scheme in the sense that you could load it into a Scheme
system and run the code. But it was restrictive -- it required you to write in
a fashion that allowed complete Hindley-Milner static type inference, and all
higher-order procedures were beta-substituted away at compile time, meaning
you could *straightforwardly* translate a prescheme program into "natural" C
code with C-level effiency. That is, you could view prescheme as a really
pleasant alternative to C for low-level code. And you could debug your
prescheme programs in the interactive Scheme development environment of your
choice, before flipping a switch and translating to C code, because prescheme
was just a restricted Scheme. The Scheme 48 byte-code interpreter was written
in prescheme. Prescheme sort of died -- beyond the academic paper he wrote,
Kelsey never quite had the time to document it and turn it into a standalone
tool that other people could use (Ian Horswill's group at Northwestern is an
exception to that claim -- they have used prescheme for interesting work).
There are ideas there to be had, however.

I subsequently picked up Scheme 48 around 1992 to build scsh, but we're
beginning to wander from T, so I'll leave that thread.

The tapestry of advanced language implementation work is a very rich and
interconnected one, the weaving of which is is an incredibly interesting task
that can keep you happily occupied for a lifetime. I've only traced out one
selected thread in that tapestry with this rambling post; there are many other
important ones. But that, to the best of my knowledge, is the story of T. 

A cautionary note: the danger of writing history when all of the principals
are still alive is that there are people around to catch you out in your
errors. I'm sure there *are* errors in my recollection, but I'm also
reasonably sure I've got the broad strokes roughly correct. Someone like
Jonathan could certainly give a much more authoritative account.
  -Olin

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Here are some references to papers I've mentioned.

This is the first paper published on T, based on T2
    \Bibitem[Rees\etal 82]{T} Jonathan A.~Rees and Norman I.~Adams {\sc iv}. \\
    T: A dialect of Lisp or, Lambda: The ultimate software tool. \\
    In {\em Conference Record of the 1982 ACM Symposium on LISP and Functional
	    Programming,} pages 114--122, August 1982.

This is a general overview of T3's Orbit:
    ORBIT: An optimizing compiler for Scheme. \\
    In {\em Proceedings of the SIGPLAN '86 Symposium on Compiler Construction,}
       published as {\em SIGPLAN Notices\/} 21(7), pages 219--233.
       Association for Computing Machinery, July 1986.

There is a later, third paper, written by Jonathan & Norman, on object systems
in general and T's in particular. I do not have a reference.

The reference manual for T is also interesting reading, for information
on the features of the language. Here is a citation:
    \Bibitem[Rees\etal 84]{TMan} Jonathan A.~Rees, Norman I.~Adams {\sc iv} 
				 and James R.~Meehan. \\
    {\em The T Manual.} \\
    4th edition, Yale University, Department of Computer Science, January 1984.
I also could probably post PostScript source for it, if people care.

Kelsey's diss:
  {\em Compilation by Program Transformation.} \\
  Ph.D.~dissertation, Yale University, May 1989.
  Research Report 702, Department of Computer Science. \\
  A conference-length version of this dissertation appears in {\em POPL 89}.

Kranz's diss:
    \Bibitem[Kranz 88]{KranzPhD} David Kranz. \\
    {\em ORBIT:  An Optimizing Compiler for Scheme.}  \\
    Ph.D.~dissertation, Yale University, February 1988.
    Research Report 632, Department of Computer Science. \\

I don't have references for Rees', Philbin's or Lamping's dissertations.
They shouldn't be hard to dig up if you care.