Online Computer Terms Dictionary - C

Common Lisp

<language> A dialect of Lisp defined by a consortium of companies brought together in 1981 by the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Companies included Symbolics, Lisp Machines, Inc., Digital Equipment Corporation, Bell Labs., Xerox, Hewlett-Packard, Lawrence Livermore Labs., Carnegie-Mellon University, Stanford University, Yale, MIT and USC Berkeley. Common Lisp is lexically scoped by default but can be dynamically scoped.

Common Lisp is a large and complex language, fairly close to a superset of MacLisp. It features lexical binding, data structures using defstruct and setf, closures, multiple values, types using declare and a variety of numerical types. Function calls allow "&optional", keyword and "&rest" arguments. Generic sequence can either be a list or an array. It provides formatted printing using escape characters. Common LISP now includes CLOS, an extended LOOP macro, condition system, pretty printing and logical pathnames.

Implementations include AKCL, CCL, CLiCC, CLISP, CLX, CMU Common Lisp, DCL, KCL, MCL and WCL.

Mailing list: <common-lisp@ai.sri.com>.

ANSI Common Lisp draft proposal.

["Common LISP: The Language", Guy L. Steele, Digital Press 1984, ISBN 0-932376-41-X].

["Common LISP: The Language, 2nd Edition", Guy L. Steele, Digital Press 1990, ISBN 1-55558-041-6].

(1994-09-29)