Lisp

• Paul Graham has an excellent, recent book on Lisp, "ANSI Common Lisp". I highly recommend it. Information about his book, his more advanced book, "On Lisp", source code, and other useful pointers to Lisp resources can be found at http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/onlisp/. The College now is using this as a text, and I noticed when I was recently at Stanford, that they use it too -- a good recommendation in itself. Notice also that Graham is the President of ViaWeb that makes a very successful software system for online stores (electronic commerce). Guess what language their system is written in!
• All of Common Lisp the Language by Steele is on the Web in html form: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/ai-repository/ai/html/cltl/cltl2.html.
• Here is a local mirror of Steele's book that I grabbed from the CMU site (with Web Devil to my Mac and then ftp'd to Unix): http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/futrelle/docs/cltl/cltl2.html
• The LISP FAQ is available from CMU, with many additional links.
• Jeff Dalton (Edinburgh AI Lab) has a Brief Guide to CLOS.

Macintosh Common Lisp

The College has recently gotten a site license for Macintosh Common Lisp and it is installed on all the lab Macs. It is a powerful and fully dynamic language with run-time typing, threads, integrated debugger and inspector, an excellent object system (CLOS), and more. By "dynamic" we mean that functions can be redefined and variables changed on the fly and the changes take effect essentially immediately. This leads to a very fast edit-run-debug-edit cycle. MCL, like all modern Lisps, compiles into very tight and efficient code. Type declarations can be omitted, allowing them to be discovered at run-time, but if they are included, as they must be in C and especially C++, the compiled code can be as fast as compiled C and C++. Professor Futrelle uses MCL for virtually all of his research work on natural language and diagram understanding. Here's the Web site for MCL.

If you are a student in one of Professor Futrelle's classes, you may be able to do all your machine problems in MCL, if you arrange it carefully with him.

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