MDL (programming language)

Article summary

MDL (Model Development Language, or colloquially also referred to as More Datatypes than Lisp or MIT Design Language ) is a programming language, a descendant of the language Lisp. Its initial purpose was to provide high-level programming language support for the Dynamic Modeling Group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Project MAC. It was developed in 1971 on a PDP-10 running ITS and later ran on TENEX, TOPS-20, BSD, and AEGIS. The initial development team consisted of Gerald Sussman and Carl Hewitt of the Artificial Intelligence Lab, and Chris Reeve, Bruce Daniels, and David Cressey of the Dynamic Modeling Group. Later, Stu Galley, also of the Dynamic Modeling Group, wrote the MDL documentation. MDL was initially called Muddle. This style of self-deprecating humor was not widely understood or appreciated outside of Project MAC. So the name was sanitized to MDL. MDL provides several enhancements to classic Lisp. It supports several built-in data types, including lists, strings and arrays, and user-defined data types. It offers multithreaded expression evaluation and coroutines. Variables can carry both a local value within a scope, and a global value, for passing data between scopes. Advanced built-in functions supported interactive debugging of MDL programs, incremental development, and reconstruction of source programs from object programs.…

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