Using Lisp on IT labs machines

Available Packages

You can add automatically the module you want by modifying the module command line in your .cshrc file.

CLISP is very fast and it is the recommended choice. Look down in the page for information on free implementations of Lisp.

Reference Manuals

• The complete reference manual for Common Lisp "Common Lisp the Language, 2nd edition", by Guy L. Steele, Thinking Machines, Inc. Digital Press, 1990 paperbound, 1029 pages, ISBN 1-55558-041-6 is available on the Web in html, dvi, ps, etc.
• The ANSI Standard for Common Lisp. This makes Lisp the first object-oriented language recognized by ANSI (American National Standards Institute).
  Common Lisp HyperSpec is another HTML document with the ANSI Common Lisp standard. It is organized differently than the previous one, but has the same contents.

Useful information

• How to use vi with Lisp
• How to use emacs with Allegro Common Lisp.
• SLIME: The Superior Lisp Interaction Mode for Emacs
• A quick reference to Emacs (pdf) from Marty Hall.
• How to capture output from Lisp into a file.
• How to profile Lisp programs.
• A minimal guide on using the Allegro CL debugger from Daniel Gaines.
• Various tools, including a make-like utility, are available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/clocc

Books on Lisp on the Web

• Links to Online Tutorials and other material on Lisp.
• Successful Lisp: How to Understand and Use Common Lisp, an online book by David B. Lamkins.
• Practical Common Lisp, APress. Another full book on line.
• Basic Lisp Techniques (pdf) by David Cooper, Jr., a complete basic Lisp book available from the Franz Inc website. It includes information specific to Allegro Common Lisp.
• Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation by David S. Touretzky, 1990. Available as .ps and .pdf.
• The Common Lisp Cookbook aims at providing for Lisp something similar to the Perl Cookbook. It includes information on foreign functions, sockets, threads. etc. It also includes links to other Lisp material on the Web.
• Introduction and Tutorial for Common Lisp, a tutorial for Lisp with hmany links to related resources.
• A short Lisp tutorial with many simple examples is Common Lisp Hints
• ANSI Common Lisp by Paul Graham. The first chapter, second chapter, and the Lisp code are available on the Web.
• On Lisp by Paul Graham. It is out of print, and Paul Graham has put it on the web. Full text available in postscript and pdf. The Lisp code is also available. Great for advanced Common Lisp techniques, especially macros.
• For more free books look at http://freecomputerbooks.com/langLispBooks.html

History and Additional Information about Lisp

• A description of the origins of Lisp and its early history http://faui8l.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/html/lisp/histlit1.html
• LISP---Notes on its past and future---1980 by John McCarthy, the creator of Lisp.
• A short description of What made Lisp different. It points out the essential features of Lisp and how features of newer languages relate to the features of Lisp.
  Peter Norvig covers something similar in A Retrospective on Paradigms of AI Programming. It includes a comparison efficiency of Lisp with Java, Python, etc.
• Paul Graham has a collection of links on his page at http://www.paulgraham.com/index.html. The page includes his famous article "Revenge of the Nerds" and "Beating the averages" where he describes how Lisp is used in Viaweb, the first Web-based application program. Viaweb was sold for $40 million in 1998 and it is now known as Yahoo!Store.
  Read Carl de Marcken: Inside Orbitz to see how Lisp is used by ITA software for airline fare search. is used by Orbitz and other airline search engines. ITA software, the company that powers the search on Orbitz, AirCanada and others, is currently the major competitor to systems (like Sabre, Galileo, Amadeus, etc) which are used by travel agents and travel web site.
• Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big by Richard P. Gabriel.
• A good collection on Lisp books and on-line resources is at http://www.lispmachine.net/
• A collection of pointers to Lisp pages can be found at http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Programming/Languages/Lisp/
• You can find short articles with Lisp examples at http://www.franz.com/support/tutorials/. Look at how to build a Unix Web server in Lisp. how to extend it to generate HTML dynamically, and more.
• At cliki, the Common Lisp Wiki, you can find lots of information about Lisp, free implementations, applications, humor, etc.
• Wikipedia Lisp Article, a brief introduction to Lisp and its history.

• a list of implementations is at http://www.cliki.net/Common%20Lisp%20implementation
• You can get a free version of Allegro Common Lisp (Allegro CL 8.1 Free Express Edition) for Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, and Mac OS X from http://www.franz.com/downloads. This is a complete version of the software but with limited heap size (60MB). It can be used for course work and non-commercial applications.
• CLISP is a bytecode-based Common Lisp implementation under GPL, that can be downloaded from http://clisp.cons.org/ or http://clisp.sourceforge.net. CLISP has been ported to many architectures (Unix, Mac, Windows under Cygwin, Mac, etc). It works very well and it is fast.
• GCL is the official Common Lisp for the GNU project. It runs on GNU/Linux architectures (x86 powerpc s390 sparc arm alpha ia64 hppa m68k mips mipsel), Windows, Sparc Solaris, and FreeBSD.
• CMUCL (originally called CMU Common Lisp) runs on most Unix platforms. Look at http://www.cons.org/cmucl/ for information and download.
• The LispWorks(TM) Personal Edition runs under Linux and Windows. It is free but has some limitations on the heap size and a time limit (5 hours) for each session.
• A collection of links and resources for free software implemented in Common Lisp and available on Unix-like systems is at http://ww.telent.net/cliki/index. The site is active and maintained using a collaborative web authoring system written in Common Lisp.
• The CLOCC - the Common Lisp Open Code Collection includes a number of free tools written in Lisp (support for sockets, shell commands, and a variety of utilities)

Lisp Quotes

• Paul Graham has a wonderful collection of quotes about Lisp at http://www.paulgraham.com/quotes.html. My favorite ones are:
  "Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot." - Eric Raymond, "How to Become a Hacker"
  "Lisp has jokingly been called "the most intelligent way to misuse a computer". I think that description is a great compliment because it transmits the full flavor of liberation: it has assisted a number of our most gifted fellow humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts." - Edsger Dijkstra, CACM, 15:10

Lisp Humor

• The Eternal Flame (God Wrote in Lisp), humor lyrics.
• The Dying Programmers
• an artistic rendition of Lisp [Thanks to John Carlis for this pointer].