Overview of Lisp
No doubt about it. Common Lisp is a big language.
–Guy L. Steele, Jr.
Foreword to Koschman 1990
This chapter briefly covers the most important special forms and functions in Lisp. It can be safely skipped or skimmed by the experienced Common Lisp programmer but is required reading for the novice Lisp programmer, or one who is new to the Common Lisp dialect.
This chapter can be used as a reference source, but the definitive reference is Steele’s Common Lisp the Language, 2d edition, which should be consulted whenever there is any confusion. Since that book is 25 times longer than this chapter, it is clear that we can only touch on the important highlights here. More detailed coverage is given later in this book as each feature ...
Get Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
