> IIRC the Lisp Machines supported C in addition to the system's dialect of Lisp.
IIRC the Lisp Machines (well, CADR at least) compiled code down to some pretty high-level machine code implemented in microcode. How many standard C idioms could actually be expressed in that kind of code?
I'm also not seeing how it would give a speed-up, which is the usual reason to code in C.
No reason you can't compile C down to that. It's just that there will be less of a clear performance advantage for C as some of the semantics will be slightly awkward to map to that instruction set.
You might still get a speedup by writing C in some areas, but I think the real reason for supporting it is that you have a bunch of legacy software and drivers written in C, and it's easier to get a C compiler working on that platform than to port all that software.
IIRC the Lisp Machines (well, CADR at least) compiled code down to some pretty high-level machine code implemented in microcode. How many standard C idioms could actually be expressed in that kind of code?
I'm also not seeing how it would give a speed-up, which is the usual reason to code in C.
Was the C compiled to microcode?