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Questions tagged [lisp]

Lisp is a (family of) general purpose functional programming language(s), based on the lambda calculus, and with the ability to manipulate source code as a data structure.

Introduction

The name LISP derives from "LISt Processing". It was originally created as a practical mathematical notation for computer programs. See wikipedia for more information.

Hello World Program in Lisp

;;; Hello World in Common Lisp

(defun helloworld ()
  (print "Hello World!"))

Popular dialects

Free Lisp Programming Books

112 questions
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Why is Lisp useful?

Lisp obviously is an advantage for the AI stuff, but it doesn't appear to me that Lisp is any faster than Java, C#, or even C. I am not a master of Lisp, but I find it incredibly difficult to understand the advantage one would get in writing…
Geek
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4 answers

What does your Lisp workflow look like?

I'm learning Lisp at the moment, coming from a language progression that is Locomotive BASIC -> Z80 Assembler -> Pascal -> C -> Perl -> C# -> Ruby. My approach is to simultaneously: write a simple web-scraper using SBCL, QuickLisp, closure-html,…
Duncan Bayne
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1 answer

Marriage of Lisp and LaTeX - has it been done?

I like LaTeX, but I find its macro system and logic both complex and weak. languages such as Schem/Lisp/Clojure are very good at macros. I imagine the entire document written in a lisp family language, which, when run, would emit LaTeX code and…
Job
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10
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2 answers

Strategy / resources for writing LISP webservices?

Background: I'm looking to write some fully functional webservices in Common Lisp as an April Fools prank on the rest of the development team at my company. There are two pieces to this: reading info from / writing it to a MySQL database, and…
Arkaaito
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9
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5 answers

Compiler design in Lisp

With some googling, I could easily find some documents in compiler design in C, Java, and C# and even in Haskell, but not in Lisp except implementing Scheme/Lisp in Lisp. Is Lisp not so popular in implementing other (not functional) programming…
prosseek
  • 280
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2 answers

How stable is Common LISP as a language?

I have been reading a bit about Common Lisp and I am considering trying to learn it (I only know very basic concepts) or even using it for some project. Question: how stable is Common Lisp as a language? What I mean is, regardless of new libraries,…
Giorgio
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Does this happen in Common Lisp?

From Steve Yegge's "Lisp is Not an Acceptable Lisp": Lisp has a little syntax, and it shows up occasionally as, for instance, '(foo) being expanded as (quote foo), usually when you least expect it. What is he talking about with '(foo) being…
user55019
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5 answers

Why is the empty list used as the list terminator in Lisp?

It seems to me that the list terminator in Lisp could be any arbitrary value. For example, the string terminator in C is the null pointer. Is there a philosophical reason why the empty list was chosen to terminate lists?
Skilldrick
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When are multimethods useful in practice?

The Common Lisp Object System (CLOS) supports multiple dispatch (multimethods). When is this a useful feature in practice? I'm not just looking for an example of hypothetical functionality that would be easier to implement with multiple…
user55019