Lisp (was: Re: [rescue] fans fans fans...)

[wlewis at mailbag.com]

Dave,

Given your large selection of Unix boxes, I'd suggest CMU CL as the best free 
choice for you. Version 18D runs quite well under Solaris for example. 
http://www.cons.org/cmucl/ will get you going.

For a good beginners text, there is " A Gentle Introduction" by David S. 
Touretzky and available for free at:
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/user/dst/www/LispBook/index.html

A good dead tree resource is Paul Graham's "Ansi Common Lisp". Info on it is 
here: http://www.paulgraham.com/acl.html

Once you are slightly hooked, check out Paul Graham's earlier book "On Lisp" 
which is available for free at http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html Grok it 
and you'll be a real lisp hacker. 

Other pointers and resources can be found at the Association of Lisp Users 
http://www.alu.org

If you decide to try Scheme then it gets even more, ah, "interesting"...

Enjoy!

William

> On June 21, Joshua D Boyd wrote:
> [large list of lisp stuff deleted for brevity]
> > I could go on...
> 
>   ...and you may name a hundred systems.  Maybe even five hundred.
> Compare that to the number of packages written in, say,
> C...FORTRAN...C++...hmm? ;)  *poke*
> 
>   [I just love yanking Josh's chain!]
> 
>   So you STILL haven't pointed me in the right direction for getting a
> quick intro to this too-many-parens-for-normal-people language.  What
> environment should I download?  What platform should I build it on?
> Are there any *PRACTICAL* introductory texts, either printed on
> online, that I should read?  Bearing in mind that I've always been a
> procedural programmer..
> 
>         -Dave
> 
> -- 
> Dave McGuire                  "Needing a calculator indicates that
> St. Petersburg, FL              your .emacs file is incomplete." -Joshua Boyd