Allegro CL Certification Program Lisp Programming Series Level I Presented by

About Lois Wolf Been working with Lisp since 1984

About Franz Inc. Founded in 1984 Lisp & Lisp Tools/Applications For general information: For technical support:

Our Goals for the Course Detailed exposure to core features of Common Lisp Use of Allegro IDE to compile, test, and debug applications

Format of the Course One 2-hour presentation each week –Lecture –Question and answer –Sample code Lecture notes and homework available, online at One-on-one help via at

Session 1 (today) Grand overview of ANSI Common Lisp –How it came to be –What it is –What it is good for Overview of the Allegro Product Suite Getting started in the IDE Top Ten basic things you need to know about Lisp programming Lisp coding conventions

Session 2 Iteration –Dolist, dotimes, do, loop, recursion Conditional Control Structures –If, when, unless, cond, case, ecase Associating a variable with a value –Let, let*, defvar, defconstant –Scope and Extent Exiting a context –Exit capabilities specific to a control structure –Return, throw/catch, unwind-protect

Session 3 Lists –How to make them, how to use them –Anatomy of a list Numbers –Numeric functions –Numeric conversions

Session 3, cont’d Arrays Sequences –Lists, vectors, strings Some Other Data Types –Symbols, characters,

Homework Lisp is best learnt by hands-on experience Many exercises for each session Will dedicate class time to reviewing exercises Lois Wolf for one-on-one assistance doing the homework or any other questions relevant to the classLois Wolf

Getting Allegro Common Lisp This class is based on Allegro CL 6.2. Trial version should be sufficient for this module –Download free from I will be using ACL on Windows You can use ACL on UNIX, but the development environment is different, and I won't be showing how to use it.

Getting Documentation Allegro Common Lisp: – ANSI Common Lisp specification – Can’t remember the name –But it contains the word “bit” –Permuted index under ‘bit’

Documentation in the IDE Accessible from the trial version Help:Tree of Knowledge Help:ANSI Common Lisp Help:Allegro CL Documentation Help:Symbol Index –Help on Selected Symbol Indexes

What's On My Bookshelf Common Lisp, The Language, 2 nd Edition. Guy L. Steele Jr. (1990, Digital Equipment Corporation. ANSI Common Lisp (Paul Graham 1996, Prentice Hall). Excellent instructive text for basic language features. On Lisp, Advanced Techniques for Common Lisp (Paul Graham 1994, Prentice Hall). Excellent instructive text for advanced techniques.

More On My Bookshelf Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp. Peter Norvig (1992, Morgan Kaufman). Excellent book on AI with well written lisp code. Object-Oriented Programming in Common Lisp, A Programmer's Guide to CLOS. Sonya E. Keene (1989, Symbolics). The Art of the Metaobject Protocol. Kiczales et. al. (1991, MIT). Advanced book on concepts of object-oriented programming in Common Lisp. Excellent, but don't bother until you have a year or two of experience.

One More Book Basic Lisp Techniques. David J. Cooper, Jr.