Version of 4 January 2004

General resources

The Lisp resources from our two textbooks are excellent. Here are the links again (they're on the course homepage too):

• The PAIP textbook The first three chapters are an excellent introduction to Common Lisp. There is additional useful material in Chapters 24 and 25. The results of running all the important code in the book, through Chapter 23 can be found here -- over 4500 lines of tests and results.
• The AIMA textbook For example, there are links to three Lisp tutorials in this section (search for "Tutorial").
• There is a useful intro which is Chapter 2 of Paul Graham's ANSI Common Lisp book. The chapter, in plaintext, can be found here.

Resources for ACL at CCIS = Allegro Common Lisp by Franz, Inc.

The substantial, enterprise-level Lisp system hosted on the CCIS Unix systems is Allegro Common Lisp, located at /arch/com/bin/lisp, and invoked with the command: lisp

Though we're using a rather older version of ACL at CCIS, v5.0.1 1999, it is perfectly adequate for this class. For example, all the PAIP tests run to completion with zero errors. Franz typically refers to their prodocut as "Allegro CL".

You interact with Allegro CL via the command line, the top-level listener. Here is Franz' documentation for the top level.

Here is the general documentation for Allegro CL, v6.1, the oldest version documented on their site.

For all other Allegro CL documentation, see the Franz documentation page.

Free Franz Lisp for Windows, Mac, Linux, and FreeBSD

These free versions have the full Common Lisp capabilities, but are limited wrt to heap size, compiling, etc. They should be fine for most basic assignments. Here is the download page for the free systems. You might also want to look into CMUCL at: http://www.cons.org/cmucl/. Whatever system you get, be sure it is a full Common Lisp implementation, including CLOS, the Common Lisp Object System.

You must check any code you hand in to make absolutely certain that it runs properly on the CCIS Unix lisp system. Your grade will be based on your code running on the CCIS Unix lisp system only. If your problem needs substantial resources, compiled files, etc., you'll want to develop on the CCIS Unix system.

Common Lisp reference

The standard reference book is available here, free and online. It is the complete text of the book: Common Lisp the Language, 2nd edition by Guy L. Steele, Thinking Machines, Inc., (Digital Press, 1990) 1029 pages, ISBN 1-55558-041-6

Go to CSG120 home page. or RPF's Teaching Gateway or homepage