Lisp Notes - 1

The nearest thing Common Lisp 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) (formerly X3.226-1994 (R1999)). The Common Lisp HyperSpec, a hyperlinked HTML version, has been derived from the ANSI Common Lisp standard. has to a motto is the koan-like description, "the programmable programming language." While cryptic,that description gets at the root of the biggest advantage Common Lisp still has over other languages.

Ideas first introduced in Lisp include the if/then/else construct,recursive function calls, dynamic memory allocation, Garbage collection (computer science) In computer science, garbage collection (GC) is a form of automatic memory management. The garbage collector attempts to reclaim memory that was allocated by the program, but is no longer referenced; such memory is called garbage. Garbage collection was invented by American computer scientist John McCarthy around 1959 to simplify manual memory management in Lisp. , First-class function In computer science, a programming language is said to have first-class functions if it treats functions as first-class citizens. This means the language supports passing functions as arguments to other functions, returning them as the values from other functions, and assigning them to variables or storing them in data structures. Some programming language theorists require support for anonymous functions (function literals) as well. In languages with first-class functions, the names of functions do not have any special status; they are treated like ordinary variables with a function type. The term was coined by Christopher Strachey in the context of "functions as first-class citizens" in the mid-1960s. s, lexical closures In programming languages, a closure, also lexical closure or function closure, is a technique for implementing lexically scoped name binding in a language with first-class functions. Operationally, a closure is a record storing a function together with an environment. The environment is a mapping associating each free variable of the function (variables that are used locally, but defined in an enclosing scope) with the value or reference to which the name was bound when the closure was created. Unlike a plain function, a closure allows the function to access those captured variables through the closure's copies of their values or references, even when the function is invoked outside their scope. , interactive programming, incremental compilation and Dynamic typing In computer programming, a type system is a logical system comprising a set of rules that assigns a property called a type (for example, integer, floating point, string) to every term (a word, phrase, or other set of symbols). Usually the terms are various language constructs of a computer program, such as variables, expressions, functions, or modules. A type system dictates the operations that can be performed on a term. For variables, the type system determines the allowed values of that term. .