When was SKILL++ first released?

It was in the 4,4 release (the 9504 release stream) which despite the name actually came out in June (ish) 1996. If I remember rightly the 9502 (4.3.4) release had SKILL++ in the "skill" executable only but not in icfb and it wasn't documented, so officially it wasn't until 9504. 

Regards,

Andrew 

Thanks Andrew.  So SKILL++ already existed for >5 years before I began my career as a SKILL programmer...!

Thanks to you, I now have the final piece for my Major Milestones in the History of SKILL:

• 1960 First LISP implementation at MIT based on John McCarthy's paper Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and their Computation by Machine.
• 1962 LISP 1.5 
• 1963 MIT Project MAC founded, which continues developing MACLISP into the mid-1980s.
• 1970 Lisp 1.5 ported to PDP-11 by Harvard freshman Richard Stallman, who later wrote Emacs and founded the Free Software Foundation.
• 1975 Gerry Sussman and Guy Steele experiment with alternative Lisp evaluation semantics, resulting in a new dialect they name Scheme.
• 1980 Franz Lisp written by faculty and students at UC Berkeley "to further research in symbolic and algebraic manipulation, artificial intelligence, and programming languages".  It is based on the Harvard PDP-11 interpreter, but borrows heavily from MACLISP.
• 1981 Work begins on Common Lisp.
• 1983 Programmers at SDA Systems, in consultation with professors from Berkeley, develop a "design framework" built around a dialect of Lisp which is "based on the semantics of Franz Lisp".  They call it SCIL for Structure Compiler Interface Language.  SDA marketing later changes the name to SKILL.
• 1984 First edition of Steele's Common Lisp the Language published.
• 1988 SDA Systems merges with ECAD to form Cadence Design Systems.
• 1990 IEEE-1178 Standard for the Scheme Programming Language approved.
• 1990 Second edition of Steele's Common Lisp the Language published.
• c. 1991 Scheme is selected as the standard extension language for CAD Frameworks by the CAD Framework Iniative (CFI - an EDA standards body).  Cadence decides to follow CFI's recommendations and move SKILL towards IEEE-1178 compliance.
• 1994  ANSI X3.226 Common Lisp standard published, which includes a specification of the Common Lisp Object System, CLOS.
• 1996 Cadence releases SKILL++, which includes features for greater IEEE-1178 compatibility, and an implementation of a subset of CLOS.
• c. 2012  A major upgrade in SKILL++ adds multiple inheritance, multiple method dispatch, and other capabilities that bring it more in line with CLOS.

 Great summary. Once you understand the Lisp capabilities SKILL, it is so much more fun to work with than many other languages.

There was a major upgrade in SKILL++ around the IC615 timeframe including multiple inheritance, multiple method dispatch and other capabilities that brought it more in line with CLOS.

I feel that the updates made SKILL++ much more usable and powerful as well as much easier to write very convoluted code. The class and method browser in the SKILL IDE is absolutely necessary.

theopaone said:

 Great summary.

Thanks!

theopaone said:

Once you understand the Lisp capabilities SKILL, it is so much more fun to work with than many other languages.

Hear hear!  ^o^ 

theopaone said:

There was a major upgrade in SKILL++ around the IC615 timeframe including multiple inheritance, multiple method dispatch and other capabilities that brought it more in line with CLOS.

Thanks!  I've added that info to the timeline.

theopaone said:

I feel that the updates made SKILL++ much more usable and powerful as well as much easier to write very convoluted code. The class and method browser in the SKILL IDE is absolutely necessary.

I didn't even know it had a class and method browser!  I'll have to try that out....