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An [Acronym] for __Lis__t __P__rocessor.

It is the canonical functional ProgrammingLanguage. EdsgerWybeDijkstra [approves | http://www8.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/IMMD8/Services/SchemeTeach/Pages/ch1/sec3_42.html] 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 [ProgrammingLanguage]s 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].
; [Clojure] : A new dialect running on the Java Virtual Machine, with access to most java libraries. Strong focus on concurrent programming

[LISP] is usually run on a VirtualMachine, although modern [LISP] implementations can compile to MachineCode. At the time of its conception, [CPU]s were so slow that requiring a VirtualMachine made [LISP] infeasible as an implementation language for real world applications. It was therefore 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 | http://apsymac33.uni-trier.de:8080/Lisp-Course]
* [Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine (Part I) |  http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/recursive.html], the original paper discussing [LISP].
* [Common lisp hyperspec | http://www.lispworks.com/reference/HyperSpec/ ]

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CategoryProgrammingLanguages, CategoryFunctionalProgrammingLanguages
Last edited on Thursday, July 9, 2009 11:01:45 pm by RonnieCollinson
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