Folks, People still interested? Well I will list some misc. info I came across. Might be totally redundant, but am doing my li'll bit.
Beginner's Text: Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation -- David S. Touretzky. A excellent book for starting. A mite on the slow side but builds solid foundations. Can be found at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/LispBook/book.pdf
Another book by David J Cooper gives a good introduction. A link can be found at www.franz.com
Some Sites www.lisp.org www.franz.com
I have tried GCL, CLISP and finally setteled on CMUCL. GCL, they say is not fully compliant with the latest CL standard. It is a compiler which translates Lisp to C and then uses GCC to compile a true native binary. Quite fast. But it seems it is not actively maintained or developed. CLISP is actively maintained or developed but it compiles to byte code which has to run on a VM. CMUCL compiles to native binary and is quite fast.
I have also got ilisp (an emacs package) to work with Xemacs and CMUCL. It allows to run lisp in a emacs buffer and one can (supposedly) do incremental developement. (Xemacs because I do not subscribe to RMS philosophy ;))
BTW Philip, Emacs _does_not_ have a built in lisp interpreter. It has a built in elisp interpreter. elisp is a very small and restricted subset of CL.
hope I am not being overly enthusiastic.
quasi p.s. I have a problem : The Alt key is not defined as the Meta key in X. In Xemacs I have to use ESC as the meta key. How do I redifine?
-- postscript --
Math is like love -- a simple idea but it can get complicated. -- R. Drabek
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