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.

Two available packages are ''defunc,'' posted to comp.sources.misc in December, 1993 (V41 i32,33), to alt.sources in January, 1994, and available from sunsite.unc.edu in pub/packages/development/libraries/defunc-1.3.tar.Z, and ''parse,'' at lamont.ldgo.columbia.edu. Other options include the S-Lang interpreter, available via anonymous ftp from amy.tch.harvard.edu in pub/slang, and the shareware Cmm (''C-minus-minus'' or ''C minus the hard stuff''). See also questions 18.16 and 20.6.

Go to the Standards FAQ to find out. Information about ANSI Z535 and ISO 3864 can be found on our website at our Labeling Standards FAQ page.

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.

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.

I'm trying to use the ANSI ''stringizing'' preprocessing operator # to insert the value of a symbolic constant into a message, but it keeps stringizing the macro's name rather than its value. I don't understand why I can't use const values in initializers and array dimensions, as in const int n = 7; int a[n];

It 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.

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.

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.

ISO 19011:2002 Guidelines for quality and/or environmental management systems auditing gives guidance on auditing that is applicable to both quality management systems and environmental management systems.

SEI = 'Software Engineering Institute' at Carnegie-Mellon University; initiated by the U.S. Defense Department to help improve software development processes. CMM = 'Capability Maturity Model', now called the CMMI ('Capability Maturity Model Integration'), developed by the SEI. It's a model of 5 levels of process 'maturity' that determine effectiveness in delivering quality software. It is geared to large organizations such as large U.S. Defense Department contractors.

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).

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.

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.

NSF/ANSI Standard 61 is entitled Drinking Water System Components-Health Effects. This is the American National Standard for health effects of drinking water system components. It establishes the health effects requirements for the chemical contaminants and impurities that are indirectly imparted to drinking water from products, components and materials used in drinking water systems.