June 2014
Intermediate to advanced
946 pages
23h 40m
English
Perhaps if we wrote programs from childhood on, as adults we'd be able to read them.
—Alan Perlis
When you buy a new appliance such as a television, it comes with an instruction booklet that lists troubleshooting hints in the following form:
PROBLEM: Nothing works.
Diagnosis: Power is off.
Remedy: Plug in outlet and turn on power switch.
If your Lisp compiler came without such a handy instruction booklet, this chapter may be of some help. It lists some of the most common difficulties that Lisp programmers encounter.
PROBLEM: You type an expression to Lisp’s read-eval-print loop and get no response—no result, no prompt.
Diagnosis: There are two likely reasons why output wasn’t printed: either Lisp is still ...
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