common-lisp


What is Common Lisp?

The other popular dialect of Lisp in addition to Scheme. It is defined in the the ANSI Common Lisp standard X3J13. A web accessible version of the standard is at Common Lisp Hyperspec. There are many important differences between Common Lisp (Abbreviated from now on as CL) and Scheme (compare scheme-vs-common-lisp). Whereas Scheme stresses a minimalist language specification, CL has a implementation specification of approximately 1000 pages. It has both lexical-scope and dynamic-scope whereas Scheme only has lexical-scope. It also includes the object system CLOS on which tiny-CLOS is based.