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John McCarthy's 1958 language treated code as data and freed unused memory without the programmer asking. The figure is taken from Britannica, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.

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Yes. It sits on the Technology shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.

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Lisp introduced garbage collection and recursion

John McCarthy's 1958 language treated code as data and freed unused memory without the programmer asking Lisp was built around linked lists and lambda expressions, and its evaluator could treat a program as data to be manipulated. McCarthy's group added automatic garbage collection around 1960 so memory did not have to be released by hand. Ideas tried first in Lisp, including conditional expressions and dynamic typing, later spread into many other languages. It sits in Mondo's technology collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.

Where this comes from

Britannica

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Tags: programming-languages, lisp, computing-history

Lisp introduced garbage collection and recursion: the short answers

Where does this come from, and can I check it?: John McCarthy's 1958 language treated code as data and freed unused memory without the programmer asking. The figure is taken from Britannica, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
Is this really a technology fact?: Yes. It sits on the Technology shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
What else can I read about it?: The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.