1This is GNU CLISP, an ANSI Common Lisp implementation. 2 3 4Availability 5============ 6 7GNU CLISP is available via anonymous ftp (sources and selected binaries) from 8 <ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/clisp/> 9and its mirrors. 10More information at 11 <http://clisp.org/>, 12 <http://www.gnu.org/software/clisp/> and 13 <http://clisp.sourceforge.net/>. 14 15See file <resources.html> on these sites, e.g. 16 <http://clisp.org/resources.html>, 17where you will find links to general Common Lisp information 18and documentation, as well as CLISP-specific links. 19 20Mailing lists 21============= 22 23There are three mailing lists for users of CLISP. You will find 24subscription information and archives on the homepage mentioned above. 25 26 27------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 28 Common Lisp CLISP 29 30Common Lisp is 31 * a general-purpose programming language and an AI language 32 * interactive 33 * a Lisp for professional use 34 35Common Lisp programs are 36 * easy to test (interactive) 37 * easy to maintain (depending on programming style) 38 * portable across hardware/OS platforms and implementations 39 (there is a standard for the language and the library functions) 40 41Our Common Lisp CLISP 42 * needs only 4 MB of memory 43 * implements most of the ANSI standard (including CLOS), 44 as well as many extensions (including MOP) 45 * can call your preferred editor 46 * is freely redistributable 47 48Common Lisp provides 49 * clear syntax, carefully designed semantics 50 * several data types: numbers, strings, arrays, lists, characters, symbols, 51 structures, streams etc. 52 * runtime typing: the programmer need not bother about type declarations, 53 but he gets notified on type violations. 54 * many generic functions: 55 88 arithmetic functions for all kinds of numbers (integers, ratios, 56 floating point numbers, complex numbers), 57 44 search/filter/sort functions for lists, arrays and strings 58 * automatic memory management (garbage collection) 59 * packaging of programs into modules 60 * an object system, generic functions with powerful method combination 61 * macros: every programmer can make his own language extensions 62 63Our Common Lisp CLISP provides 64 * an interpreter 65 * a compiler which makes execution of programs 5 times faster 66 * all data types with unlimited size (the size need never be declared, 67 the size of lists and arrays may be changed dynamically) 68 * integers of arbitrary length, unlimited floating point number precision 69 * 800+ library functions and macros, 600+ of them written in C 70 71CLISP compares well with other ANSI CL implementations wrt performance 72in most areas, such as CLOS, I/O, lists, integer arithmetics (CLISP's 73bignum performance is better than that of some other CL implementations). 74The worst performance CLISP exhibits in the area of floating point 75arithmetics. While showing nothing spectacularly bad and easily 76outperforming Java, Perl, TCL and any Scheme interpreter, CLISP is slower 77than another open-source CL implementation, CMU CL (http://www.cons.org/cmucl), 78which outperforms C and FORTRAN. If your code is heavily numeric, you 79might prefer CMUCL, otherwise CLISP is a wise choice. 80 81------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 82 83