I am trying to learn a thing or two about lisp (a bit late
I confess, a few years after completing graduate school --
i.e., having 'grown up' on FORTRAN, Modula-II, Ada, C/C++,
that sort of things...); so, I have been lurking in this
newsgroup for a wee while, took note of recommendations
about books, got myself Graham's, Keene's, and Seibel's
books, downloaded CMUCL (and CLISP on my iBook) -- somehow
arbitrarily I picked Common Lisp (and CLOS) as a starting
point, may be I missed a better dialect? -- to play with,
and trying to twist my mind around the lisp way of doing
things :-)
now what I am looking for is a language reference book; i.e.,
not a book that teaches the language, but a concise reference
to have next to the keyboard to quickly find about such or
such feature (even if it means going back to the in-depth
books); any suggestion?
--Sylvain
Sylvain wrote:
> now what I am looking for is a language reference book; i.e.,
> not a book that teaches the language, but a concise reference
> to have next to the keyboard to quickly find about such or
> such feature (even if it means going back to the in-depth
> books); any suggestion?
The appendix of Graham's Ansi CL. Perhaps if you gain permission from
Graham, someone may then scan it if you don't have it.
Tayssir
On Sat, 16 Jul 2005 10:03:10 -0700, <····@att.net> wrote:
>
> now what I am looking for is a language reference book; i.e.,
> not a book that teaches the language, but a concise reference
> to have next to the keyboard to quickly find about such or
> such feature (even if it means going back to the in-depth
> books); any suggestion?
Sounds like the Hyperspec, or CLtL2 (2nd edition by Steele). ACL from
Graham has a quick reference in the back and 'learn lisp in 21 pages'
in front. Reading the CMUCL manual is good, using Google, e.g. search
for "with-open-stream", works too. Playing at the REPL can be
enlightening.
--
[ingvar] Modelling forest damage by storms with regular expressions is...
a curious idea.
[Xach] before: ||| after: //_
[Xach] seems easy enough to me
Sylvain <····@att.net> writes:
> I am trying to learn a thing or two about lisp (a bit late
> I confess, a few years after completing graduate school --
> i.e., having 'grown up' on FORTRAN, Modula-II, Ada, C/C++,
> that sort of things...); so, I have been lurking in this
> newsgroup for a wee while, took note of recommendations
> about books, got myself Graham's, Keene's, and Seibel's
> books, downloaded CMUCL (and CLISP on my iBook) -- somehow
> arbitrarily I picked Common Lisp (and CLOS) as a starting
> point, may be I missed a better dialect? -- to play with,
> and trying to twist my mind around the lisp way of doing
> things :-)
>
> now what I am looking for is a language reference book; i.e.,
> not a book that teaches the language, but a concise reference
> to have next to the keyboard to quickly find about such or
> such feature (even if it means going back to the in-depth
> books); any suggestion?
For a pure reference, your best bet is the Hyperspec[1]. You can
download it for convenient offline access and in a proper Common Lisp
devolopment environment (e.g. SLIME in Emacs) the Hyperspec entries
for all the functions, macros, etc. in Common Lisp should be but a
keystroke away. (Other than looking up individual entries, you may
have to use the Hyperspec before it's organization sinks in well
enough to be able to find what you are looking for.)
-Peter
[1] <http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Front/index.htm>
--
Peter Seibel * ·····@gigamonkeys.com
Gigamonkeys Consulting * http://www.gigamonkeys.com/
Practical Common Lisp * http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/
From: Pascal Costanza
Subject: Re: a language reference book for Common Lisp?
Date:
Message-ID: <3jsug7Frn4ugU1@individual.net>
Sylvain wrote:
> I am trying to learn a thing or two about lisp (a bit late
> I confess, a few years after completing graduate school --
> i.e., having 'grown up' on FORTRAN, Modula-II, Ada, C/C++,
> that sort of things...); so, I have been lurking in this
> newsgroup for a wee while, took note of recommendations
> about books, got myself Graham's, Keene's, and Seibel's
> books, downloaded CMUCL (and CLISP on my iBook) -- somehow
> arbitrarily I picked Common Lisp (and CLOS) as a starting
> point, may be I missed a better dialect? -- to play with,
> and trying to twist my mind around the lisp way of doing
> things :-)
The two widely used Lisp dialects nowadays are Common Lisp and Scheme.
There are others, but they typically have a much more narrow focus.
> now what I am looking for is a language reference book; i.e.,
> not a book that teaches the language, but a concise reference
> to have next to the keyboard to quickly find about such or
> such feature (even if it means going back to the in-depth
> books); any suggestion?
For Common Lisp, I think that Guy Steele's "Common Lisp the Language,
2nd Edition" is still a good choice. There are some differences between
the material in that book (which is from 1989) and the final ANSI Common
Lisp standard (which is from 1994), but apart from that it's very good,
especially if you prefer printed matter.
Pascal
--
2nd European Lisp and Scheme Workshop
July 26 - Glasgow, Scotland - co-located with ECOOP 2005
http://lisp-ecoop05.bknr.net/
Sylvain wrote:
> I am trying to learn a thing or two about lisp (a bit late
> I confess, a few years after completing graduate school --
> i.e., having 'grown up' on FORTRAN, Modula-II, Ada, C/C++,
> that sort of things...); so, I have been lurking in this
> newsgroup for a wee while, took note of recommendations
> about books, got myself Graham's, Keene's, and Seibel's
> books, downloaded CMUCL (and CLISP on my iBook) -- somehow
> arbitrarily I picked Common Lisp (and CLOS) as a starting
> point, may be I missed a better dialect? -- to play with,
> and trying to twist my mind around the lisp way of doing
> things :-)
>
> now what I am looking for is a language reference book; i.e.,
> not a book that teaches the language, but a concise reference
> to have next to the keyboard to quickly find about such or
> such feature (even if it means going back to the in-depth
> books); any suggestion?
>
> --Sylvain
I'm also a newbie to Lisp, but I've found some useful references to get
to started. I keep this URL open while I'm working:
http://www.supelec.fr/docs/cltl/cltl2.html
check out the index.
I found the hyperspec harder to use, but useful also:
http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Front/index.htm
I also found the Touretsky book to be an easy read, and a good
introduction to Lisp. It took me about two weeks to go through it, doing
only a few exercises, so that I wouldn't slow down:
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/user/dst/www/LispBook/
I'm now doing the real learning, working on my project, but I intend to
read Peter Seibel's Practical Common Lisp too:
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/user/dst/www/LispBook/
It seems to take a quite different approach to the language, for
example, macros come up rather early in the book. People here seem to
like the book very much. Not having read it yet, and not having the
depth of knowledge of some of the people in this group, I'm not in a
position to have an opinion about it.
Hope this helps.
Barry Jones
From: Edi Weitz
Subject: Re: a language reference book for Common Lisp?
Date:
Message-ID: <u64v9q12f.fsf@agharta.de>
On Sat, 16 Jul 2005 22:56:01 -0400, Barry Jones <········@acm.org> wrote:
> I'm now doing the real learning, working on my project, but I intend
> to read Peter Seibel's Practical Common Lisp too:
>
> http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/user/dst/www/LispBook/
Here's the correct link:
<http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/>
Edi.
--
Lisp is not dead, it just smells funny.
Real email: (replace (subseq ·········@agharta.de" 5) "edi")
..quick note to thank you guys for the very quick and
helpful answers (I downloaded Hyperspec -- will figure out
how to use it shortly :-) -- and Steele's CLtL2,
as well as the doc that explains the difference between
this doc and the ANSI CL); also checked out the other
links mentioned and I now have a lot of things to read!
--Sylvain
ps... also realized that I might as well bite the bullet
and actually learn how to use Emacs, but I digress :-)
From: lin8080
Subject: Re: a language reference book for Common Lisp?
Date:
Message-ID: <42DF7C5F.C5D87F2@freenet.de>
Edi Weitz schrieb:
> Edi.
>
> --
>
> Lisp is not dead, it just smells funny.
Oh Edi. You are such a well informed poster. Please change your sig, hm?
stefan
don't execute this will link to the end