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List of Names
Short Form
Full Form
- Common Lisp
- See:
- Language type:
F - Functional or lambda-based
- Description:
Lisp is a quasi-functional language
characterized by s-expression syntax
and lists as it primary data structure.
Common Lisp is a standardized dialect
of Lisp, intended to be highly portable
and serve the needs of the Lisp programming
community. Most Lisp implementations
today are compliant (more-or-less) with
the Common Lisp standard.
As a standard, Common Lisp defines the
following facilities for the language:
- Basic data types: symbols, numbers (integer, rational, float, complex), characters
- Lists and an extensive set of list operations
- Arrays (vectors, strings, bit-vectors) and array functions
- Hash tables and functions for them
- Various other specialized data types: property lists, paths, streams, readtables, structures
- Lexical and dynamic scoping
- Control structure and function definition forms
- A very rich Macro system
- Packages and modules
- basic I/O, file handling facilities, file system interface
- Compiler usage and environment
- OOP for Lisp: The Common Lisp Object System (CLOS)
- Exception handling
Common Lisp grew out of an effort,
begun in 1981, to unify the fragmented
Lisp community. The first Common Lisp
book was written by Steele in 1984. In 1985, an
effort was started to standardize the
language in a formal setting, which led to
the development of an ANSI standard in 1993
and an ISO standard in 1994.
Both commercial and free implementations
of Common Lisp are widely available.
- Origin:
Guy L. Steele et al, 1984, 1990.
Chapman, ANSI sub-committee X3J13, 1991.
- See Also:
- Remarks:
Common Lisp is a fairly big and complex
language. Almost all of it is a coalesence
of other Lisp dialects: Interlisp, Franz
Lisp, MacLisp, Flavors Lisp, and others. One of
the biggest contributions of the Common
Lisp standard was adding a comprehensive
object-oriented programming facility to
the language; prior to the definition of
CLOS each kind of Lisp had its own OOP
method (Flavors, LOOPS, etc.)
The 1990 book Common Lisp the Language, 2nd Edition, by
Guy Steele, is famous for its clear and
complete treatment of the language.
- Links:
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- Date:
- Sample code:
Descriptions in this dictionary are ©1997-99 Neal Ziring. Some
examples copyright of their respective authors. Some
technologies and languages are trademarked. Permission to
copy descriptions is granted as long as authorship credit is preserved.
Comments on this dictionary, corrections and suggestions, are all welcome.
Please use email, the address is ziring@home.com
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Dictionary and script maintained by Neal Ziring, last major modifications 3/18/98. Most recent
additions to dictionary and master list, 1/00.