Common Lisp

Lisp is a family of computer programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized prefix notation. Originally specified in 1958, Lisp is the second-oldest high-level programming language in widespread use today. Only Fortran is older, by one year. Lisp was invented by John McCarthy while he was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). McCarthy published its design in a paper in Communications of the ACM in 1960, entitled "Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part I". He showed that with a few simple operators and a notation for functions, one can build a Turing-complete language for algorithms. Lisp has since been adapted to many different purposes, with major dialects including Common Lisp, Scheme, Clojure, and Emacs Lisp. It has influenced many other programming languages, and was the first language used to develop artificial intelligence (AI). Lisp is a dynamic, interpreted language. It is used in a wide variety of applications, from commercial software to research projects. Common Lisp is the most widely used dialect of Lisp. It was originally developed by Guy Steele and Richard Gabriel in the early 1980s. Common Lisp is a standards-compliant, general-purpose programming language. It features an incremental development environment, powerful debugging tools, and a rich set of libraries. Scheme is a dialect of Lisp that was designed to have a much simpler syntax and semantics than Common Lisp. Scheme is widely used in education, and its small size makes it suitable for embedded systems. Clojure is a dialect of Lisp that runs on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). It is a general-purpose language with an emphasis on functional programming. Clojure is widely used in the software industry, with many large companies using it for mission-critical applications. Emacs Lisp is the dialect of Lisp used in the GNU Emacs text editor. It is also used in a number of other programs, including the Org-mode productivity suite and the Gnus newsreader. Emacs Lisp is a full-featured programming language, with a rich set of libraries and tools for development.