Common Lisp

Common Lisp (CL) is a dialect of the Lisp programming language, published in ANSI standard document ANSI INCITS 226-1994 (R2004) (formerly X3.226-1994 (R1999)). The Common Lisp HyperSpec, a hyperlinked HTML version, has been derived from the ANSI Common Lisp standard. Common Lisp (CL) is a dialect of the Lisp programming language, published in ANSI standard document ANSI INCITS 226-1994 (R2004) (formerly X3.226-1994 (R1999)). The Common Lisp HyperSpec, a hyperlinked HTML version, has been derived from the ANSI Common Lisp standard. The Common Lisp language was developed as a standardized and improved successor of Maclisp. By the early 1980s several groups were already at work on diverse successors to MacLisp: Lisp Machine Lisp (aka ZetaLisp), Spice Lisp, NIL and S-1 Lisp. Common Lisp sought to unify, standardise, and extend the features of these MacLisp dialects. Common Lisp is not an implementation, but rather a language specification. Several implementations of the Common Lisp standard are available, including free and open-source software and proprietary products.Common Lisp is a general-purpose, multi-paradigm programming language. It supports a combination of procedural, functional, and object-oriented programming paradigms. As a dynamic programming language, it facilitates evolutionary and incremental software development, with iterative compilation into efficient run-time programs. This incremental development is often done interactively without interrupting the running application. It also supports optional type annotation and casting, which can be added as necessary at the later profiling and optimization stages, to permit the compiler to generate more efficient code. For instance, fixnum can hold an unboxed integer in a range supported by the hardware and implementation, permitting more efficient arithmetic than on big integers or arbitrary precision types. Similarly, the compiler can be told on a per-module or per-function basis which type safety level is wanted, using optimize declarations. Common Lisp includes CLOS, an object system that supports multimethods and method combinations. It is often implemented with a Metaobject Protocol. Common Lisp is extensible through standard features such as Lisp macros (code transformations) and reader macros (input parsers for characters). Common Lisp provides some backwards compatibility to Maclisp and to John McCarthy's original Lisp. This allows older Lisp software to be ported to Common Lisp. Work on Common Lisp started in 1981 after an initiative by ARPA manager Bob Engelmore to develop a single community standard Lisp dialect. Much of the initial language design was done via electronic mail. In 1982, Guy L. Steele, Jr. gave the first overview of Common Lisp at the 1982 ACM Symposium on LISP and functional programming. The first language documentation was published 1984 as Common Lisp the Language, first edition. A second edition, published in 1990, incorporated many changes to the language, made during the ANSI Common Lisp standardization process. The final ANSI Common Lisp standard then was published in 1994. Since then no update to the standard has been published. Various extensions and improvements to Common Lisp (examples are Unicode, Concurrency, CLOS-based IO) have been provided by implementations and libraries (many available via Quicklisp). Common Lisp is a dialect of Lisp. It uses S-expressions to denote both code and data structure. Function calls, macro forms and special forms are written as lists, with the name of the operator first, as in these examples: