The College has recently gotten a site license for Macintosh Common Lisp and it will soon be 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.
News: MacWorld & MacTech Magazines Announce Eddy Award Finalists December 12, 1997 - MCL 4.1 is an Editor's Choice Finalist in the category of Best Rapid Development Tool. (Won by 4th Dimension 6, but it's nice to be a finalist!)
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.