5.3 Lisp
5.3.1 Introduction
Lisp (List processing)3 was developed by John McCarthy and his students at MIT in 1958 for artificial intelligence (McCarthy 1960). (Lisp is, along with Fortran, one of the two oldest programming languages still in use.) An understanding of Lisp will both improve your ability to learn new languages with ease and help you become a more proficient programmer in your language of choice. In this sense, Lisp is the Latin of programming languages.
There are two dialects of Lisp: Scheme and Common Lisp. Scheme can be used for teaching language concepts; Common Lisp is more robust and often preferred for developing industrial applications. Scheme is an ideal programming language for exploring language semantics and implementing ...
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