Is Common Lisp useful?

Lastly, for a lot of classes of problems, Lisp is a great practical language. It provides good performance (usually not as fast as C, but dramatically faster than most “scripting languages”), safety, automatic memory management, a decent “standard library” of functions and tremendous opportnities for easy extension.

Does Lisp have syntax?

Lisp is an expression oriented language. Unlike most other languages, no distinction is made between “expressions” and “statements”; all code and data are written as expressions. However, the syntax of Lisp is not limited to traditional parentheses notation.

Who created Common Lisp?

John McCarthy
Lisp/Designed by

Why do people have a common lisp?

Common Lisp is also an excellent language for exploratory programming–if you don’t know exactly how your program is going to work when you first sit down to write it, Common Lisp provides several features to help you develop your code incrementally and interactively.

What’s the difference between Lisp 2 and Common Lisp?

Lisp-2 has distinct function and value namespaces. In Lisp-2, the rules for evaluation in the functional position of a form are distinct from those for evaluation in the argument positions of the form. Common Lisp is a Lisp-2 dialect. Knowing now the difference between the two, what does it really mean?

What makes Common Lisp an extensible programming language?

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.

Is there a hyperlinked version of Common Lisp?

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.

Which is the most important cell in Lisp?

Of these, value cell and function cell are the most important. Symbols in Lisp are often used similarly to identifiers in other languages: to hold the value of a variable; however there are many other uses. Normally, when a symbol is evaluated, its value is returned.