Global InformationCommon Lisp information
 | |
| Paradigm | Multi-paradigm: procedural, functional, object-oriented, meta, reflective, generic |
|---|---|
| Family | Lisp |
| Designed by | Scott Fahlman, Richard P. Gabriel, David A. Moon, Kent Pitman, Guy Steele, Dan Weinreb |
| Developer | ANSI X3J13 committee |
| First appeared | 1984, 1994 for ANSI Common Lisp |
| Typing discipline | Dynamic, strong |
| Scope | Lexical, optionally dynamic |
| OS | Cross-platform |
| Filename extensions | .lisp, .lsp, .l, .cl, .fasl |
| Website | common-lisp |
| Major implementations | |
| Allegro CL, ABCL, Clasp, CLISP, Clozure CL, CMUCL, ECL, GCL, LispWorks, Scieneer CL, SBCL, Symbolics Common Lisp | |
| Dialects | |
| CLtL1, CLtL2, ANSI Common Lisp | |
| Influenced by | |
| Lisp, Lisp Machine Lisp, Maclisp, Scheme, Interlisp | |
| Influenced | |
| Clojure, Dylan, Emacs Lisp, EuLisp, ISLISP, *Lisp, AutoLisp, Julia, Moose, R, SKILL, SubL | |
Common Lisp (CL) is a dialect of the Lisp programming language, published in American National Standards Institute (ANSI) standard document ANSI INCITS 226-1994 (S2018)[1] (formerly X3.226-1994 (R1999)).[2] The Common Lisp HyperSpec, a hyperlinked HTML version, has been derived from the ANSI Common Lisp standard.[3]
The Common Lisp language was developed as a standardized and improved successor of Maclisp. By the early 1980s several groups were already at work on diverse successors to MacLisp: Lisp Machine Lisp (aka ZetaLisp), Spice Lisp, NIL and S-1 Lisp. Common Lisp sought to unify, standardise, and extend the features of these MacLisp dialects. Common Lisp is not an implementation, but rather a language specification.[4] Several implementations of the Common Lisp standard are available, including free and open-source software and proprietary products.[5] Common Lisp is a general-purpose, multi-paradigm programming language. It supports a combination of procedural, functional, and object-oriented programming paradigms. As a dynamic programming language, it facilitates evolutionary and incremental software development, with iterative compilation into efficient run-time programs. This incremental development is often done interactively without interrupting the running application.
It also supports optional type annotation and casting, which can be added as necessary at the later profiling and optimization stages, to permit the compiler to generate more efficient code. For instance, fixnum can hold an unboxed integer in a range supported by the hardware and implementation, permitting more efficient arithmetic than on big integers or arbitrary precision types. Similarly, the compiler can be told on a per-module or per-function basis which type of safety level is wanted, using optimize declarations.
Common Lisp includes CLOS, an object system that supports multimethods and method combinations. It is often implemented with a Metaobject Protocol.
Common Lisp is extensible through standard features such as Lisp macros (code transformations) and reader macros (input parsers for characters).
Common Lisp provides partial backwards compatibility with Maclisp and John McCarthy's original Lisp. This allows older Lisp software to be ported to Common Lisp.[6]
- ^ "ANSI Standards Action - December 28, 2018" (PDF). ansi.org. Archived (PDF) from the original on April 12, 2021.
- ^ Quoted from cover of cited standard. ANSI INCITS 226-1994 [S2008], for sale on standard's document page Archived September 27, 2020, at the Wayback Machine.
- ^ "CLHS: About the Common Lisp HyperSpec (TM)". lispworks.com.
- ^ "CLHS: Section 1.1.2". lispworks.com.
- ^ "Common Lisp Implementations: A Survey". Archived from the original on April 21, 2012. Retrieved December 22, 2007.
- ^ "Old LISP programs still run in Common Lisp". Retrieved May 13, 2015.