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September 12, 2004
Up and Running with Lisp
I’ve now installed not one, not two, but three Lisps on my Mac:
Of the three, so far I prefer Steel Bank the best; it is derived from CMU Common Lisp, but it works with SLIME which is unfortunately not something I can say for CMU Common Lisp. I’m sure I’m doing something wrong but I’m not sure what it is. Of the three Lisps in question, the breakdown seems to be:
- CMUCL is the biggest and oldest
- CLisp is intended as a light-weight interpretter, and isn’t fully compliant
- Steel Bank is CMUCL, without various non-CL features or backwards compatibility, with an increased focus on maintainability.
SLIME, I must say, is a real piece of work. Getting it installed is fairly easy (though if I hadn’t thought to try it on these other Lisps I might have been fairly frustrated). It basically pops open an interpretter and manages your work between it and Emacs. The way it works is also quite interesting; it basically runs a copy of your Lisp, loads a little server package written in Lisp (named Swank), and then connects to that server to do the work. This means, of course, if you were some kind of a pervert you could run a single Swank instance on your machine and have all of your little Emaxen connect to just it. :) I’m thinking about it…
I should post a screen shot of my new “IDE” when I get a chance.
Anyway, duty calls… :)
Posted by FusionGyro at September 12, 2004 06:39 AM
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