Common Lisp the Language is a reference book by Guy L. Steele about a set of technical standards and programming languages named Common Lisp.
The first edition (Digital Press, 1984; ISBN 0-932376-41-X; 465 pages) was written by Guy L. Steele Jr., Scott E. Fahlman, Richard P. Gabriel, David A. Moon, and Daniel L. Weinreb. It served as the basis for the Common Lisp technical standard by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), and is thus termed ANSI Common Lisp.
The second edition (Digital Press, 1990; ISBN 1-55558-041-6; 1029 pages) was written by Guy L. Steele Jr. It reflected the then-current status of the standardizing process and documented important new features such as Common Lisp Object System (CLOS), the loop macro, and conditions. It also has a chapter on series and generators.
The ANSI Common Lisp standard was published in 1994 and differs from the language dialects described in Common Lisp the Language (1984) and Common Lisp the Language, Second Edition (1990). Substantive additions and deletions were made between the time of the Second Edition and the final version of ANSI Common Lisp. Also, series and generators were discussed in appendix matter of the Second Edition but were not a part of any working draft nor the final version of ANSI Common Lisp.
Although ANSI Common Lisp and the language dialects described by the two editions of Common Lisp the Language differ, the ANSI Common Lisp specification indirectly acknowledges the practical importance of Common Lisp the Language (first and second edition) by explicitly suggesting the reserved words (keywords) :cltl1 and :cltl2 for potential inclusion on the *features* list, allowing conditionals to be added to code that must interoperate between ANSI Common Lisp and those other dialects.
  | This article about a computer book or series of books is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
Common Lisp (CL) is a dialect of the Lisp programming language, published in ANSI standard document ANSI INCITS 226-1994 (S20018). The Common Lisp HyperSpec, a hyperlinked HTML version, has been derived from the ANSI Common Lisp standard.
Kyoto Common Lisp (KCL) is an implementation of Common Lisp by Taichi Yuasa and Masami Hagiya, written in C to run under Unix-like operating systems. KCL is compiled to ANSI C. It conforms to Common Lisp as described in the 1984 first edition of Guy Steele's book Common Lisp the Language and is available under a licence agreement.
Lisp is a family of programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized prefix notation. Originally specified in 1958, Lisp is the second-oldest high-level programming language. Only Fortran is older, by one year. Lisp has changed since its early days, and many dialects have existed over its history. Today, the best-known general-purpose Lisp dialects are Racket, Common Lisp, Scheme, and Clojure.
Scheme is a minimalist dialect of the Lisp family of programming languages. Scheme consists of a small standard core with several tools for language extension.
Maclisp is a programming language, a dialect of the language Lisp. It originated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Project MAC in the late 1960s and was based on Lisp 1.5. Richard Greenblatt was the main developer of the original codebase for the PDP-6; Jon L. White was responsible for its later maintenance and development. The name Maclisp began being used in the early 1970s to distinguish it from other forks of PDP-6 Lisp, notably BBN Lisp.
Genera is a commercial operating system and integrated development environment for Lisp machines developed by Symbolics. It is essentially a fork of an earlier operating system originating on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) AI Lab's Lisp machines which Symbolics had used in common with Lisp Machines, Inc. (LMI), and Texas Instruments (TI). Genera is also sold by Symbolics as Open Genera, which runs Genera on computers based on a Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) Alpha processor using Tru64 UNIX. It is released and licensed as proprietary software.
In computer programming, the scope of a name binding—an association of a name to an entity, such as a variable—is the part of a program where the name binding is valid, that is where the name can be used to refer to the entity. In other parts of the program the name may refer to a different entity, or to nothing at all. The scope of a name binding is also known as the visibility of an entity, particularly in older or more technical literature—this is from the perspective of the referenced entity, not the referencing name.
Kent M. Pitman (KMP) is a programmer who has been involved for many years in the design, implementation, and use of systems based on the programming languages Lisp and Scheme. Since 2010, he has been President of HyperMeta, Inc.
The Common Lisp Object System (CLOS) is the facility for object-oriented programming which is part of ANSI Common Lisp. CLOS is a powerful dynamic object system which differs radically from the OOP facilities found in more static languages such as C++ or Java. CLOS was inspired by earlier Lisp object systems such as MIT Flavors and CommonLoops, although it is more general than either. Originally proposed as an add-on, CLOS was adopted as part of the ANSI standard for Common Lisp and has been adapted into other Lisp dialects such as EuLisp or Emacs Lisp.
Guy Lewis Steele Jr. is an American computer scientist who has played an important role in designing and documenting several computer programming languages and technical standards.
Le Lisp is a programming language, a dialect of the language Lisp.
X3J13 is the name of a technical committee which was part of the International Committee for Information Technology Standards. The X3J13 committee was formed in 1986 to draw up an American National Standards Institute (ANSI) Common Lisp standard based on the first edition of the book Common Lisp the Language, by Guy L. Steele Jr., which was formerly a de facto standard for the language. The primary output of X3J13 was an American National Standard for programming language Common Lisp (X3.226/1994), approved December 8, 1994. X3J13 later worked with International Organization for Standardization (ISO) working group SC22/WG16 on an internationally standardised dialect of Lisp named ISLISP.
New Implementation of LISP (NIL) is a programming language, a dialect of the language Lisp, developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) during the 1970s, and intended to be the successor to the language Maclisp. It is a 32-bit implementation, and was in part a response to Digital Equipment Corporation's (DEC) VAX computer. The project was headed by Jon L White, with a stated goal of maintaining compatibility with MacLisp while fixing many of its problems.
The Common Lisp HyperSpec is a technical standard document written in the hypertext format Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). It is not the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) Common Lisp standard, but is based on it, with permission from ANSI and the International Committee for Information Technology Standards. Originally developed by Kent Pitman at Harlequin, it is now copyrighted by LispWorks Ltd. It is approximately 15 megabytes (MB) of data in 2,300 files which contain approximately 105,000 hyperlinks.
In Lisp programming languages, a fexpr is a function whose operands are passed to it without being evaluated. When a fexpr is called, only the body of the fexpr is evaluated; no other evaluations take place except when explicitly initiated by the fexpr. In contrast, when an ordinary Lisp function is called, the operands are evaluated automatically, and only the results of these evaluations are provided to the function; and when a (traditional) Lisp macro is called, the operands are passed in unevaluated, but whatever result the macro function returns is automatically evaluated.
Emacs or EMACS is a family of text editors that are characterized by their extensibility. The manual for the most widely used variant, GNU Emacs, describes it as "the extensible, customizable, self-documenting, real-time display editor". Development of the first Emacs began in the mid-1970s, and work on its direct descendant, GNU Emacs, continues actively as of 2021.
The history of the programming language Scheme begins with the development of earlier members of the Lisp family of languages during the second half of the twentieth century. During the design and development period of Scheme, language designers Guy L. Steele and Gerald Jay Sussman released an influential series of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) AI Memos known as the Lambda Papers (1975–1980). This resulted in the growth of popularity in the language and the era of standardization from 1990 onward. Much of the history of Scheme has been documented by the developers themselves.
David A. Moon is a programmer and computer scientist, known for his work on the Lisp programming language, as co-author of the Emacs text editor, as the inventor of ephemeral garbage collection, and as one of the designers of the Dylan programming language. Guy L. Steele Jr. and Richard P. Gabriel (1993) name him as a leader of the Common Lisp movement and describe him as "a seductively powerful thinker, quiet and often insulting, whose arguments are almost impossible to refute".
Alice Hartley (1937-2017) was an American computer scientist and business woman. Hartley worked on several dialects of Lisp, implementing multiple parts of Interlisp, maintaining Macintosh Common Lisp, and developing concepts in computer science and programming language design still in use today.
