Where Lisp Is Available

 

LY215:

    Allegro Common Lisp (Franz, Inc.)

 

Unix Machines:

    Gnu Common Lisp

          You need to add the following pathname to your .login file:

                   /usr/local/bin/clisp/bin

          To access, simply type: clisp

          To exit, type:  (exit)

          To break out, type:  ^z

          To load a file, test.lsp, from "yourdirectory", type:

                   (load "~yourdirectory/test.lsp")

 

Your own copy:

                There are various versions of Lisp (and also Scheme, a dialect of Lisp) available for downloading from Internet.  Here is some information from Dr. Daniel Chester, University of Delaware:

 

The common lisp that I like for PCs is GNU CLISP.  It is an interpreter

and can compile programs into byte code, giving a 5x speedup over the

interpreter.  The file you need to down load is clisp-2.28-win32.zip,

found at

 

http://sourceforge.net/projects/clisp/

 

You will also want to look at

 

http://clisp.sourceforge.net

 

or

 

http://clisp.cons.org

 

for information about and related to clisp.

 

The above zip file is about 2.8 MB in size.

 

To install it, I put the zip file in a subdirectory and unzipped it.

 

After you unzip it, look in the src subdirectory and see whether the

file extensions are .lisp or .lis.  They are supposed to be .lisp, but

my unzip program is an old one, so it changed the extensions to .lis.

For this reason, I had to change the ".lisp" that appears in install.bat

to ".lis" before running it.

 

Running install.bat will create an icon on your desktop for invoking

clisp that way.  It also creates the file

 

C:\WINDOWS\"All Users"\desktop\clisp.bat

 

This is the file that starts up clisp.  I had to edit it by changing

all the slashes that appear before "lisp.exe" to backslashes. then

clisp.bat will work properly.

 

I copied this clisp.bat file to C:\ so that I can start clisp in a

MSDOSPrompt window by typing \clisp.  I prefer this to clicking on

the desktop icon.

 

I do not bother to change the config.lisp file as described in the

README file.

 

Using clisp should be straightforward.  When you get into the debugger

(Break prompt), if you type help, you will get a list of the commands

available in the debugger.  To get out of the debugger and get to the

previous level of lisp, type ^Z.  To get out of clisp altogether, you

can type (exit) or ^Z.

 

There is another common lisp for PCs that you might want to consider;

this is Corman Common Lisp.  This commercial common lisp can be downloaded

without revealing who you are, and is "free for personal use."  The file

that you download is about 4.8 MB in size.  Corman Common Lisp is fully

functional, unlike Franz or Xanalys (was Harlequin), which cripple their

products in various ways and require your name when they let you download

free copies of their products.  Corman Common Lisp always compiles your

code (into machine language for the Intel mpus) whenever you run it;

it doesn't interpret your code.

 

There are a few other free lisps available for PCs, but either they don't

run under Windows or they deviate significantly from common lisp.