Why doesn't Common Lisp have continuations?
Frequently Asked Questions for comp.lang.lispContinuations are a great theoretical tool; if a language has first-class, multiply invocable continuations then one can build threads, exceptions, coroutines, and the kitchen sink on top. However, there is an implementation burden with continuations; supporting first-class, multiply invocable continuations complicates things tremendously for the Lisp implementor.
Related QuestionsWhy does Common Lisp have "#'"?
Kantrowitz & Margolin comp.lang.lisp FAQis a macro-character which expands #'FOO to (FUNCTION FOO). Symbols in Lisp have two bindings, one for values and one for functions, allowing them to represent both variables and functions, depending on context. #'FOO accesses FOO's lexical function binding in a context where the value interpretation would normally occur. #' is also used to create lexical closures for lambda expressions.
Related QuestionsWhat is the difference between Scheme and Common Lisp?
Kantrowitz & Margolin comp.lang.lisp FAQScheme is a dialect of Lisp that stresses conceptual elegance and simplicity. It is specified in R4RS and IEEE standard P1178. (See the Scheme FAQ for details on standards for Scheme.) Scheme is much smaller than Common Lisp; the specification is about 50 pages, compared to Common Lisp's 1300 page draft standard. (See question [4-10] for details on standards for Common Lisp.) Advocates of Scheme often find it amusing that the Scheme standard is shorter than the index to CLtL2.
Related QuestionsWhat is Pearl Common Lisp?
Kantrowitz & Margolin comp.lang.lisp FAQWhen Apple Computer acquired Coral Software in January 1989, they re-released Coral's Allegro Common Lisp and its optional modules as Macintosh Allegro Common Lisp (now just Macintosh Common Lisp). Coral's other product, Pearl Lisp, was discontinued at that time. Pearl Lisp provides a subset of the functionality of MACL 1.3 and is not even fully CLtL1-compatible (e.g., the implementation of defstruct is different). Despite rumors to the contrary, Pearl Lisp is not and never was public domain.
Related QuestionsWhere can I get a copy of the ANSI Common Lisp standard? What is ISO Lisp?
Kantrowitz & Margolin comp.lang.lisp FAQof December 8, 1994, Common Lisp is now an official ANSI Standard: ANSI X3.226:1994 American National Standard for Programming Language Common LISP (X3J13). Copies of the ANSI/X3.226 standard may be purchased from the American National Standards Institute 11 West 42nd Street New York, NY 10036 For more information, visit the ANSI home page at http://www.ansi.org/ A web version of the ANSI Common Lisp standard is not available. The official ANSI standard is available only in hardcopy form.
Related QuestionsWhich should I learn, Common Lisp or Scheme? What's the difference?
Lisp FAQCommon Lisp is powerful but ugly. Scheme is small and clean, but the standard only defines the inner core of the language. If I had to deliver an application I'd probably use Common Lisp; if I were teaching a course I might use Scheme (but with Common Lisp macros).
Related QuestionsWhat is the equivalent of EXPLODE and IMPLODE in Common Lisp?
Kantrowitz & Margolin comp.lang.lisp FAQHopefully, the only reason you need to do this is as part of trying to port some old MacLisp code to Common Lisp. These functions predated the inclusion of strings as a first-class data type in Lisp; symbols were used as strings, and they ere EXPLODEd to allow the individual characters to be manipulated in a list.
Related QuestionsIs Scheme a lisp?
Frequently Asked Questions for comp.lang.lispScheme is a member of the greater family of Lisp languages, assuming that is considered to include others like Dylan and Emacs Lisp. The design of Scheme predates the ANSI Common Lisp standard, and some CL features such as lexical scoping may be considered to have been derived from Scheme. More detailed comparative discussions don't generally prove very productive; those that are interested in discussing Scheme should first consider discussing it in comp.lang.
Related QuestionsWhat is Lisp?
Lisp FAQLisp is a family of programming languages descended from a language John McCarthy invented (or more accurately, discovered) in the late 1950s. The two main dialects now are Common Lisp and Scheme. We're working on a new dialect called Arc.
Related QuestionsStaging Area for the Common Lisp FAQBut you now wish to add a special case. Simple: (defun foo (bar &optional (special-case nil)) (if special-case 0 (+ bar 42))) (foo 3) 45 (foo 3 t) 0 Rather than having to write two functions, with the oldest one delegating to the new one, you simply amend the existing one with optional arguments, all of which you give a default value that you can now account for in the new version.Related Questions
In the context of Common Lisp, what is Symmetric-multiprocessing?
Allegro Common Lisp FAQSMP Lisp is one in which performance can scale with processor count as well as with processor speed. It makes "just add more cpus" an option for dealing with increased load. It's pretty well known that a problem has to factor in an unusual way for this to work, whatever language and library is used.
Related QuestionsWhat books should I read to learn more about Common Lisp?
Common Lisp FAQPeter Seibel's Practical Common Lisp, a.k.a. PCL, is a good starting place if you already know how to program in some other language. It's available online at http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book and in dead tree form from Apress. It has been widely praised and won a Productivity Award in the technical book category of the 16th Annual Jolt Product Excellence Awards. PCL covers almost all aspects of the language and focuses on how to actually put them together to build non-trivial programs.
Related QuestionsIs there a set of solutions to the problems in ANSI Common Lisp?
Lisp FAQUnfortunately not. I was supposed to write one, but we started Viaweb right after the book went to press, and I never got around to it.
Related QuestionsHow does little b extend LISP?
littleb.org - home of the little b modular modeling languageA rule system which enables code to be run when objects matching some criteria are detected. This capability is based on an efficient pattern-matching algorithm called RETE. The current implementation uses the open source LISA engine. Top-level macros for defining object classes and rules: defcon, defrule, defprop, define - and defmethod is extended.
Related QuestionsWhere can I find free lisp compilers or interpreters?
Frequently Asked Questions for comp.lang.lispA lightweight common lisp interpreter and compiler, which compiles to bytecode, and runs on Windows, AmigaOS, Acorns, OS/2 and most flavours of Unix. CLISP's implementation of CLOS is currently not quite complete. CLISP is licensed under the GNU GPL. CMUCL interpreter and optimizing compiler to native code running on a few flavours of Unix (including x86/FreeBSD, x86/Linux and sparc/Solaris). CMUCL can be difficult to compile; it requires itself to build itself, and bootstrapping is an issue.
Related QuestionsWhere can I buy a professional lisp system?
Frequently Asked Questions for comp.lang.lispFranz Inc's Allegro Common Lisp is a fine lisp development environment. See their website for more detailsLCL Another offering from Xanalys, LispWorks has a different set of extensions above the ANSI specification from LCLMCL A commercial natively multithreaded implementation of Common Lisp for various Unixes.Symbolics Common Lisp
Related QuestionsWhat online resources are there for lisp users?
Frequently Asked Questions for comp.lang.lispA non-normative transferral of the official ANSI standard for Common Lisp to the hypertext medium, by Kent Pitman.Association of Lisp Users
Related QuestionsHow common is it?
Obesity FAQ - Special Sections > Weighed Down > The Issues |...In 1999, there were 58,476 deaths due to heart disease in California. This was 26 percent of the total number of deaths from all causes.
Related QuestionsFrequently Asked Questions About Allergic Asthma - XOLAIR (O...The National Institutes of Health estimates that 60% of the people in the United States with asthma have allergic asthma.Related Questions
A common question that seems to be coming up is, what does the law say?
WNBR Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)Yup, it seems that almost everywhere in the world riding your bicycle naked is illegal — but still we do it !!! Picture at left is from a past Artists for Peace Nekked bike ride in Vancouver, BC. Click on image for larger view. Most of the nekkid rides that we have done in Vancouver, have been, well pretty much Nekkkidd, but Vancouver is a lot more tolerant than say Beijing or Riyadh. Alanis Morissette attacks "U.S.
Related QuestionsHow do I find a Emacs Lisp package that does XXX?
GNU Emacs FAQFirst of all, you should check to make sure that the package isn't already available. For example, typing M-x apropos <RET> wordstar <RET> lists all functions and variables containing the string 'wordstar'. It is also possible that the package is on your system, but has not been loaded. To see which packages are available for loading, look through your computer's lisp directory (see File-name conventions).
Related QuestionsWhat advantages does writing in Qi have over writing in Lisp?
FAQuses pattern-matching instead of forcing you to write in CARs and CDRs. Typically Qi programs have 40% of the non-whitespace characters that Lisp programs have. has optional static type checking. You don't have to pray your program will not crash with a type error in a real application.
Related QuestionsHow do I call non-Lisp functions from Lisp?
Kantrowitz & Margolin comp.lang.lisp FAQMost Lisp implementations for systems where Lisp is not the most common language provide a "foreign function" interface. As of now there has been no significant standardization effort in this area. They tend to be similar, but there are enough differences that it would be inappropriate to try to describe them all here.
Related QuestionsHow can I learn Lisp?
Lisp FAQThe way to learn any language is to write programs in it. You have two main dialects to choose between: Scheme and Common Lisp. They each have advantages and disadvantages, but the differences between them are tiny compared to the differences between them and other languages, so if you want to start learning Lisp, it doesn't matter which you choose. There are good books about both dialects, and many good free implementations.
Related QuestionsWhere can I get a copy of On Lisp?
Lisp FAQIt looks as if the book is going to be in print again soon, but if you are determined to have a valuable first edition, you can get a used copy at Amazon.
Related QuestionsWhere can I get a Lisp interpreter?
Staging Area for the Common Lisp FAQYou probably mean an interactive command processor that accepts Lisp expressions, evaluates them and prints their results. If so, you should simply look for a Common Lisp implementation or development environment, without regard to how expressions are processed. Although native machine code Lisp compilers have been available since the early 1960s, many outsiders still tend to refer to Lisp environments as "interpreters", with an implied assumption of poor performance.
Related QuestionsIs Lisp Slow?
Staging Area for the Common Lisp FAQAnswer 2: Some free Common Lisp implementations have native-code compilers that are about half as fast as C. This translates to 2-4 times the speed of Java and 50-80 times the speed of Perl, Python, or Ruby. Refer to http://www.norvig.com/Lisp-retro.html for details.
Related QuestionsWhere can I find more Lisp packages?
FAQ (komplett)The best place to start looking is in the newsgroup gnu.emacs.sources, this can be searched online via Deja.com After that the Emacs Lisp List, which is maintained by Stephen Eglen <stephen@anc.ed.ac.uk> , is another good starting point, this lists several hundred lisp files, and a brief description, and thanks to ell.el can be used from within Emacs. WoMan allows Unix MAN pages to be browsed within Emacs, this lisp package requires no external programs.
Related QuestionsWhat is a LISP Routine and what do they do?
Lanc & Tully AutoCAD FAQLISP is a programming language that AutoCAD can understand. Many people have written LISP routines to perform all kinds tasks for AutoCAD users. You can think of them as scripts, macros, programs, or code. Basically, they are just text files with instructions (in a special language) that AutoCAD uses to automate repetitive or complicated AutoCAD tasks. An.lsp ? An autonumbering routine that creates and spaces a sequence of numbers for paperspace notes. Clo.lsp ? Current Layer Offset.
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