The Art of Lisp Programming [Paperback]

Many of us already have at least a passing acquaintance with procedural languages such as BASIC or Pascal, but may not have met a functional language like Lisp before. Using the same enjoyable and sometimes quirky style that they employed so successfully in The Art of C-Programming , Robin Jones and his team explain the fundamentals of Lisp in a way that students from school to postgraduates will find lucid and stimulating. The book is unique in illustrating the use of Lisp through the development of a realistic project: the design and implementation of a Lisp-based interpreter for the language ABC.Many of us already have at least a passing acquaintance with procedural languages such as BASIC or Pascal, but may not have met a functional language like Lisp before. Using the same enjoyable and sometimes quirky style that they employed so successfully in The Art of C-Programming , Robin Jones and his team explain the fundamentals of Lisp in a way that students from school to postgraduates will find lucid and stimulating. The book is unique in illustrating the use of Lisp through the development of a realistic project: the design and implementation of a Lisp-based interpreter for the language ABC.1 Some Basic Ideas.- Lists.- Representing Lists.- The Interpreter.- Functions.- Two More Primitives.- Constants and Variables.- S-Expressions.- Postscript.- Exercises 1.- Answers.- 2 List Functions.- Splitting Lists.- car and cdr.- Setting Up Lists.- setq.- A Piece of Pedantry.- Head and Tail Revisited.- cons.- Postscript.- Exercises 2.- Answers.- 3 Predicates.- cond.- Boolean Functions.- Exercises 3.- Answers.- 4 Recursion.- Powers.- Boolean Functions Revisited.- eq.- Meanwhile Back at the Problem....- null.- AND and OR.- flat.- first.- rest.- The Fly in the Ointment.- append and list.- Postscript.- Exercises 4.- Answers.- 5 A Look Back (and Forward).- Variables: a Sense of Place.- Variable Scope.- Variable Binding.- Free Variables.- Lexical Scoping.- A Software Engineering lSÃ