Christopher B. Browne's Home Page


Christopher Browne

Table of Contents
1. Lisp and Its Kin
2. Common Lisp
3. Scheme
4. Other Lisps
5. Miscellaneous Lisp Advocacy
6. Lisp-based OSes

1. Lisp and Its Kin

Lisp and its friends are languages that mix features of functional and imperative programming styles along with lots of parentheses. These days, there are three major Lisp dialects in common use:

What is Lisp? John McCarthy, initial inventor of Lisp, wrote the following back in 1980, LISP - Notes on its Past and Future - 1980

As a programming language, LISP is characterized by the following ideas:

Ignorant people commonly assert that " Lisp is interpreted, and hence a slow language"; if we go back to the original Lisp 1.5 documentation , we discover that Lisp was intended for use with compilers even from the very beginning.


If this was useful, let others know by an Affero rating

Contact me at