Hacker News new | comments | show | ask | jobs | submit login What Happens When You Mix Java with a 1960 IBM Mainframe ( thenewstack.io ) 143 points by 3n7r0pY 9 hours ago | hide | past | web | 57 comments | favorite Animats 5 hours ago I'm still struggling with my own legacy code problem. I'm reviving an old LISP program from the early 1980s. Parts of it were written for the original Stanford AI Lab SAIL system in the 1970s. It last ran under Franz LISP in 1986. My current struggle is with one line of code: (defun getenode (l) (cadr l)) That ought to be simple enough. But it's being applied not to a list, but a "hunk". A "hunk" is an obsolete MacLISP concept.[1]. It's a block of memory which has N contiguous LISP cells, each with two pointers. This is the memory object underlying structures and arrays in MacLISP. Macros were used to create the illusion...