An Acronym for List Processor.

It is the canonical functional ProgrammingLanguage. EdsgerWybeDijkstra approves of it.

The secret to reading LISP is to look at the indenting. You will go mad if you count the brackets. The secret to writing LISP is to always use an editor such as Emacs that autoindents LISP code and highlights matching brackets for you.

The name LISP has really come to denote a family of ProgrammingLanguages in practice:

CommonLisp

Standardised, heavy-duty Lisp - "the most thorough programming language in the universe".

Scheme

Elegant intellectual Lisp. Coding acrobats do their backflips here.

Elisp

The scripting language controls every aspect of Emacs.

LISP is usually run on a VirtualMachine, although modern LISP implementations can compile to MachineCode. At the time of its conception, CPUs were so slow that requiring a VirtualMachine made LISP programs infeasible as an implementation language for real world applications. It was therefor attempted to build processors that could run LISP directly - so called LISP machines. Like any other attempt to date to realize a certain VirtualMachine in hardware, LISP machines too failed to achieve any significance in the market and were soon forgotten.

Interesting Links

• QuickLispTutorial
• Online LISP tutorial
• Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine (Part I), the original paper discussing LISP.

CategoryProgrammingLanguages, CategoryFunctionalProgrammingLanguages