Didn't know about the planned GC tricks (I mostly treat LISP 2 in passing so it most salient superficial points: the syntax and the fact it never happened), interesting!
W.r.t. tutorials: the most code-rich chapter is the one about "the Maxwell equations of software". As a Smalltalker, I'm well aware of Kay's label of the code in the LISP 1.5 manual. It's a good exercise, especially for non-Lispers, but dare I say also for most Lispers, to implement this stuff to both see how powerful simple ideas can be and to see how this magic works in its bare essence (stripped of "noise" like parsers, etc). The rest is basically illustrations of concepts, and that's on purpose; I wanted to write a history book primarily aimed at techies, so code had to be there.
W.r.t. tutorials: the most code-rich chapter is the one about "the Maxwell equations of software". As a Smalltalker, I'm well aware of Kay's label of the code in the LISP 1.5 manual. It's a good exercise, especially for non-Lispers, but dare I say also for most Lispers, to implement this stuff to both see how powerful simple ideas can be and to see how this magic works in its bare essence (stripped of "noise" like parsers, etc). The rest is basically illustrations of concepts, and that's on purpose; I wanted to write a history book primarily aimed at techies, so code had to be there.