Is Lisp a virtual machine like JVM?

Question

Why would someone refer to Lisp as a virtual machine like JVM?

Answer 1

Probably because that person refers to a specific implementation of Lisp which runs on top of a Virtual Machine? Various Lisp systems since atleast the 70s have been running on top of specialized virtual machines. Some current implementations like CLISP and CMUCL still have their own virtual machines.

Virtual machines for Lisp are usually specially tailored for the demands of Lisp. They provide the necessary primitive data types (like cons cells, symbols and large integers), instruction set (generic function calling, run-time data type checking, ...), memory management (garbage collection) and other services (dynamic loading of code). They often provide some kind of extended stack machine.