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Common Lisp may be expanded, but it still has the core of early Lisp, and its ancestors trace back to it: ZetaLisp, Maclisp, Lisp 1.5, Lisp 1.

It still has the old operators: car, cdr, cons, eval, apply, append, cond, quote, lambda, set, setq, atom, and, eq, equal, list, map, mapcon, maplist, nconc, not, null, or, print, prog, read, remprop, rplaca, rplacd, ...

It has the old data structures like symbols and cons cells.

Thus programs from 1960 often can be made running in Common Lisp, unless they make use of system specific functions.




There were no system specific functions in 01960 because there was only one system, which is to say, one implementation of LISP. EVAL was dynamically scoped. And good luck getting any FEXPR-based code from 01960 to run!


Lucky us, writing FEXPRs was not a documented feature in the Lisp 1 manual from 1960.




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