Franz Lisp was a Lisp implementation developed at the University of California, Berkeley by students of Richard Fateman. They developed Franz Lisp for porting Macsyma algebra system, an enormous Lisp application written in Maclisp, to DEC VAX-11 minicomputer. UC Berkeley distributed it with the Berkeley Software Distribution. Franz Inc. was founded to provide commercial support of Franz Lisp, but the company switched to Common Lisp afterward.
The original code is retrieved from Franz Lisp Opus 38.93b at the CMU AI Repository. According to the page, that is placed in the public domain. However, since the origin of the code is the Berkeley Software Distribution, it would be safer to treat it as distributed under the term of the 4-clause BSD License. Thus, I decided to do so. Kamil Rytarowski pointed it out, thanks a lot!
Note that UCB has declared that the clause 3 is no longer effective for their code in BSD, so Franz Lisp in this repository is practically under the term of the 3-clause BSD License that is OSI-approved and GPL-compatible.
See ftp://ftp.cs.berkeley.edu/pub/4bsd/README.Impt.License.Change for details.
Also, this repository contains no code from AT&T.
The doc/ directory contains the Franz Lisp manual written in roff. The
manual in the PDF format can be obtained at the Software
Preservation Group's Web site.
The franz/ directory contains the source code of the interpreter called
lisp. It is mostly written in C but plain old (pre-ANSI) one. There is also
some assembly code for VAX, Motorola 68000 and so on.
The lisplib/ directory contains Lisp code that may or may not run on Franz
Lisp, from official essential libraries to some advanced libraries such as a
port of Flavors (an object-oriented Lisp system) and the loop macro. You must
have fun here! :)
The liszt/ directory contains the source code of the compiler called liszt.
It is written in Franz Lisp itself. The names of franz and liszt are taken from
the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt.
The pearl/ directory contains an implementation of PEARL (Package for
Efficient Access to Representations in Lisp) AI programming language that was
developed by Michael Deering and Joseph Faletti at the Berkeley AI Research
Project (BAIR). Some information is available at the Michael Deering's Web
page about PEARL.
The utils/ directory contains some utilities used by the original developers.