This is GNU CLISP, an ANSI Common Lisp implementation. What is LISP? ------------- LISP is a general purpose programming language. It was invented by J. McCarthy in 1959. There have been many dialects of it, but nowadays LISP has been standardized and wide-spread due to the industrial standard ANSI COMMON LISP. There are applications in the domains of symbolic knowledge processing (AI), numerical mathematics (MACLISP yielded numerical code as good as FORTRAN), and widely used programs like editors (EMACS) and CAD (AUTOCAD). There are introductions to the language: Sheila Hughes: Lisp. Pitman Publishing Limited, London 1986. Paul Graham: "ANSI Common Lisp", Prentice Hall, 1995, ISBN 0133708756. <http://paulgraham.com/acl.html> and "On Lisp", Prentice Hall, 1993. ISBN 0130305529. <http://paulgraham.com/onlisp.html> After a while wou will need the standard text containing the language definition: Guy L. Steele Jr.: Common Lisp - The Language. Digital Press. 1st edition, 1984, 465 pages. 2nd edition, 1990, 1032 pages. This book is available in HTML form via FTP from ftp://ftp.cs.cmu.edu/user/ai/lang/lisp/doc/cltl/cltl_ht.tgz and can be viewed through WWW under http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/html/cltl/cltl2.html or http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/ai-repository/ai/html/cltl/cltl2.html . For experts: This standard text has emerged into an ANSI standard, which you can get free of charge from http://www.lisp.org/HyperSpec/FrontMatter/ LISP is run in an interactive environment. You input forms, and they will be evaluated at once. Thus you can inspect variables, call functions with given arguments or define your own functions. Contents: --------- This distribution contains the following files of interest: doc/clisp.1 manual page in Unix man format doc/clisp.man pre-formatted manual page doc/clisp.html manual page in HTML format doc/impnotes.html, doc/impnotes.css, doc/clisp.png implementation notes (user manual) doc/LISP-tutorial.txt LISP tutorial for beginners doc/CLOS-guide.txt brief guide to CLOS doc/editors.txt survey of editors with Lisp support README this text SUMMARY a short description of CLISP ANNOUNCE announcement NEWS list of modifications since the last version COPYRIGHT copyright notice GNU-GPL free software license emacs/*.el Emacs customization, see doc/editors.txt src/clisp.c source of the driver program src/config.lisp site-dependent configuration and - for your convenience, if you like reading sources - src/*.lisp the source of lispinit.mem src/*.fas the same files, already compiled Installation: ------------- Type make Optionally, change the strings in src/config.lisp, using a text editor. If you did, you need to save these changes in the memory image: start base/lisp.run -M base/lispinit.mem When the LISP prompt [1]> _ appears, type (without-package-lock () (load (compile-file "src/config.lisp"))) and then (cd "base/") (saveinitmem) to overwrite the file lispinit.mem with your configuration. Then (exit) The rest is done by make install When you encounter problems: ---------------------------- After errors, you are in the debugger: Break 1 [2]> _ You can evaluate forms, as usual. Furthermore: Help prints context-sensitive help Abort or Unwind climbs up to the next higher input loop Backtrace shows the contents of the stack, helpful for debugging And you can look at the values of the variables of the functions where the error occurred. See <http://clisp.cons.org/impnotes/debugger.html> for more information. If you think you found a bug in CLISP, please see <http://clisp.cons.org/clisp.html#bugs> on how to report it. Sources: -------- The sources of CLISP are available from ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/clisp/ http://clisp.cons.org/ http://www.gnu.org/software/clisp/ http://www.clisp.org/ http://clisp.sf.net/ Mailing Lists: -------------- There are three mailing lists for users of CLISP. You can find subscription information and archives on the homepage http://clisp.cons.org/. Acknowledgement: ---------------- We are indebted to * Guy L. Steele and many others for the Common Lisp specification. * Richard Stallman's GNU project for GCC, Autoconf and the readline library. Authors: -------- Bruno Haible Michael Stoll Maintainer: ----------- Sam Steingold