Common 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).

Scheme 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.

Scheme 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.

Continuations 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.

The 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.

Peter 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.

is 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.

When 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.

Lisp has a lot in common with a lot of other programming languages— loops, arrays, objects, functions ... in short, everything you'd want in a modern programming language.

of 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.

Hopefully, 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.

The Online Tutorial page at CLiki lists a number of online tutorials, books and articles. (The CLiki is a wiki written in Common Lisp and devoted to providing information related to Free and Open Source software implemented in Common Lisp. The other main Lisp wiki is the wiki run by the Association of Lisp Users which lives at http://wiki.alu.org/.) Other resources that you may find useful as you start Lisping are: Practical Common Lisp.

Books about Lisp implementation include: 1. John Allen "Anatomy of Lisp" McGraw-Hill, 1978. 446 pages. ISBN 0-07-001115-X Discusses some of the fundamental issues involved in the implemention of Lisp. 2. Samuel Kamin "Programming Languages, An Interpreter-Based Approach" Addison-Wesley, Reading, Mass., 1990. ISBN 0-201-06824-9 Includes sources to several interpreters for Lisp-like languages. The source for the interpreters in the book is available by anonymous FTP from a.cs.uiuc.

Dov Grobgeld wrote a tutorial specifically to get Script-Fu users up to speed quickly. It's available at http://imagic.weizmann.ac.il/~dov/gimp/scheme-tut.html . Thanks to Henk Huitema (huitema@cwi.nl) for passing on this URL after the original pages disappeared. You might also check out MIT's Scheme page. Tim Mooney asked about scheme documentation on the developer's mailing list; here is his summary: Regarding my query on good references for a would-be Schemer, thanks to: "Daniel X.

Lisp 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.

SMP 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.

Unfortunately 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.

The O'Reilly book GNU Emacs Extensions by Bob Glickstein is also a good source of information, although dated.

A scheme is closed when no new entrants are allowed to join and, sometimes, when benefits stop building up. A scheme is terminated when its sponsoring company terminates its responsibility to pay contributions.

Our Group Exercise program emphasizes traditional aerobics classes with a energetic feel. Our student instructors are extensively trained, coinciding with national standards. They are prepared to teach anything from your traditional hi/lo classes to step, kickboxing, body sculpting, aquatic exercise, etc. The fee for Group Exercise is $40 a semester--a fee that includes unlimited class participation. You may find anywhere from 10-50+ people in a class.

A 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.

Franz 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

A non-normative transferral of the official ANSI standard for Common Lisp to the hypertext medium, by Kent Pitman.Association of Lisp Users

Common cold and the flu are both caused by viruses, and they are often confused. There is a lot of overlap in symptoms, however there are important differences. The cold is much more common, and the flu is much more serious. A mild case of the flu is generally worse than a bad cold. Many people mistakenly believe that their, “Flu shot didn’t work,” because they mistake what is really a cold for the flu.

There are very important differences between the flu and common cold, so take note! Having a cold usually means having a stuffy nose and sore throat, along with a mild-to-moderately uncomfortable feeling in your chest. You'll probably be sneezing, coughing, and feeling a bit achy, too. The flu, on the other hand, can mean really bad news. Yes, the flu makes you sneeze. It can also give you a stuffy nose and sore throat.

Both of these plasters are typically used for interior applications, but fresco lime plaster is composed of aged lime putty and fine aggregates.

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.