This is GNU CLISP, an ANSI Common Lisp implementation.


What is LISP?
-------------

LISP is a general purpose programming language.
It was invented by J. McCarthy in 1959.
There have been many dialects of it, but nowadays LISP has been standardized
and wide-spread due to the industrial standard ANSI COMMON LISP. There are
applications in the domains of symbolic knowledge processing (AI), numerical
mathematics (MACLISP yielded numerical code as good as FORTRAN), and
widely used programs like editors (EMACS) and CAD (AUTOCAD).
There are introductions to the language:

  Sheila Hughes: Lisp. Pitman Publishing Limited, London 1986.
  Paul Graham: "ANSI Common Lisp", Prentice Hall, 1995, ISBN 0133708756.
  <http://paulgraham.com/acl.html>
  and "On Lisp", Prentice Hall, 1993. ISBN 0130305529.
  <http://paulgraham.com/onlisp.html>

After a while wou will need the standard text containing the language
definition:

  Guy L. Steele Jr.: Common Lisp - The Language. Digital Press.
  1st edition, 1984, 465 pages.
  2nd edition, 1990, 1032 pages.

This book is available in HTML form via FTP from
  ftp://ftp.cs.cmu.edu/user/ai/lang/lisp/doc/cltl/cltl_ht.tgz
and can be viewed through WWW under
  http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/html/cltl/cltl2.html or
  http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/ai-repository/ai/html/cltl/cltl2.html .

For experts: This standard text has emerged into an ANSI standard, which
you can get free of charge from

  http://www.lisp.org/HyperSpec/FrontMatter/

LISP is run in an interactive environment. You input forms, and they will be
evaluated at once. Thus you can inspect variables, call functions with given
arguments or define your own functions.


Contents:
---------

This distribution contains the following files of interest:

   doc/clisp.1            manual page in Unix man format
   doc/clisp.man          pre-formatted manual page
   doc/clisp.html         manual page in HTML format
   doc/impnotes.html,
   doc/impnotes.css,
   doc/clisp.png          implementation notes (user manual)
   doc/LISP-tutorial.txt  LISP tutorial for beginners
   doc/CLOS-guide.txt     brief guide to CLOS
   doc/editors.txt        survey of editors with Lisp support
   README                 this text
   SUMMARY                a short description of CLISP
   ANNOUNCE               announcement
   NEWS                   list of modifications since the last version
   COPYRIGHT              copyright notice
   GNU-GPL                free software license
   emacs/*.el             Emacs customization, see doc/editors.txt
   src/clisp.c            source of the driver program
   src/config.lisp        site-dependent configuration


and - for your convenience, if you like reading sources -

   src/*.lisp             the source of lispinit.mem
   src/*.fas              the same files, already compiled


Installation:
-------------

Type

         make

Optionally, change the strings in src/config.lisp, using a text editor.
If you did, you need to save these changes in the memory image: start

         base/lisp.run -M base/lispinit.mem

When the LISP prompt

      [1]> _

appears, type

      (without-package-lock ()
        (load (compile-file "src/config.lisp")))

and then

        (cd "base/")
        (saveinitmem)

to overwrite the file lispinit.mem with your configuration. Then

        (exit)

The rest is done by

        make install


When you encounter problems:
----------------------------

After errors, you are in the debugger:

     Break 1 [2]> _

You can evaluate forms, as usual. Furthermore:

     Help
               prints context-sensitive help
     Abort     or
     Unwind
               climbs up to the next higher input loop
     Backtrace
               shows the contents of the stack, helpful for debugging

And you can look at the values of the variables of the functions where the
error occurred.
See <http://clisp.cons.org/impnotes/debugger.html> for more information.

If you think you found a bug in CLISP, please see
<http://clisp.cons.org/clisp.html#bugs> on how to report it.


Sources:
--------

The sources of CLISP are available from
     ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/clisp/
     http://clisp.cons.org/
     http://www.gnu.org/software/clisp/
     http://www.clisp.org/
     http://clisp.sf.net/


Mailing Lists:
--------------

There are three mailing lists for users of CLISP. You can find subscription
information and archives on the homepage http://clisp.cons.org/.


Acknowledgement:
----------------

We are indebted to
  * Guy L. Steele and many others for the Common Lisp specification.
  * Richard Stallman's GNU project for GCC, Autoconf and the readline library.


Authors:
--------

        Bruno Haible
        Michael Stoll

Maintainer:
-----------

        Sam Steingold
