Common LISP. The Language. Second Edition [Paperback]

Guy Steele (Author)

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Amazon.com Review

This is the Lisp programmers' bible. If you need to know the official specification, every function defined in Common Lisp can be found in here somewhere. Anyone vaguely serious about programming in Lisp for extended periods of time should keep a copy of this book for reference. However, note that while this book is clearly written, it is not an introduction to programming in Lisp--Common Lisp: The Language only offers the language specification.

Product Description

The defacto standard - a must-have for all LISP programmers.


In this greatly expanded edition of the defacto standard, you'll learn about the nearly 200 changes already made since original publication - and find out about gray areas likely to be revised later. Written by the Vice- Chairman of X3J13 (the ANSI
committee responsible for the standardization of Common Lisp) and co-developer of the language itself, the new edition contains the entire text of the first edition plus six completely new chapters. They cover: - CLOS, the Common Lisp Object System, with new features to support function overloading and object-oriented programming, plus complete technical specifications * Loops, a powerful control structure for multiple variables * Conditions, a generalization of the error signaling mechanism * Series and generators * Plus other subjects not part of the ANSI standards but of interest to professional programmers. Throughout, you'll find fresh examples, additional clarifications, warnings, and tips - all presented with the author's customary vigor and wit.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 1029 pages
• Publisher: Digital Press; 2 edition (June 15, 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1555580416
• ISBN-13: 978-1555580414
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #108,324 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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  Books > Computers & Internet > Programming > Languages & Tools > Lisp

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24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Perhaps the best computer language reference ever written, June 26, 2003

By	James Arvo (Pasadena, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Common LISP. The Language. Second Edition (Paperback)

"Common Lisp, The Language" (or CLTL) is an industrial-strength language reference for a somewhat esoteric computer language (in the view of most programmers today), so this tome is definitely not for the novice, nor for the faint of heart. However, if you are a true devotee of Common Lisp, then it is hard to imagine how you can escape this most sacred of texts. I own two dog-eared and heavily marked-up copies of the book, from which I have gotten my money's worth many times over. For years one or the other of these copies has been a permanent fixture on my desk, beside my keyboard. It is an invaluable reference for serious Common Lisp programmers.

However, as a previous reviewer pointed out, CLTL is strictly a reference, not a text. If you attempt to use it as an introductory text, you will hate both the book and the language, which will be your loss. To learn the language, I would recommend either "Lisp", by Winston and Horn, or "ANSI Common Lisp", by Paul Graham. After perhaps several years of serious Lisp programming, you will most likely find yourself studying the pages of CLTL, at which point you will appreciate what Guy Steele has succeeded in accomplishing in this slender volume of 1029 pages. Common Lisp is an enormous language, with over 800 built-in functions, many of which have complicated semantics and dozens of keywords that alter those semantics. Considering the daunting task of documenting this language, Steele deserves a medal. (In fact, the book has received various awards.)

Common Lisp was an integral part of several classes that I taught at Caltech for many years; I had students write compilers, interpreters, theorem provers, symbolic manipulators, numerical solvers, graph algorithms, etc. When you attack such a wide range of problems with a single language, you appreciate how rich Common Lisp is, and how well suited it is to all these tasks (yes, even numerical computation). But to get the most out of the language, it's necessary to tap into its more esoteric functions, which is where Steele's book is very handy.

I can think of few topics in the field of computer science that have as rich a history as the language Lisp. It's difficult to present a meaningful view of the language, especially in it's "Common" incarnation, without delving into some of that history. Steele does this exceedingly well in CLTL, although I can understand how it can be off-putting to some; it adds bulk to an already formidable tome, and at times seems to clutter up what ought to be a cut-and-dried presentation of syntax and semantics. However, unless you subscribe to the mystical view that Lisp was created by divine fiat (a theory that is gaining popularity), then you will inevitably have questions as to why things were done in one way and not another. The answers provide insight into language design (or at least the workings of the X3J13 committee), and at times a better mastery of Common Lisp. For those who do not care for such details, Steele sets the digressions off from the main body of the text, making them easy to skip. But I, for one, am happy that this information is recorded somewhere. (If nothing else, it keeps the creationists at bay.)

Like the mathematician Gilbert Strang, who manages to inject humor into the driest of mathematical journals, Steele has found ample opportunities to sneak bits of wordplay and irreverence into CLTL for comic relief. Not only does Steele enliven his program fragments with snippets of pop culture, as in

"(loop for turtle in teenage-mutant-ninja-turtles do..."

but all such references are assiduously listed in the index, which makes it a real hoot to glance through. Listed there are "Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus", and "Michelangelo (artist)" as well as "Michelangelo (turtle)". We also find things like "goody two-shoes", "oranges, comparing apples with", "square peg in round hole", and numerous foods, including garbanzo beans, ice cream, orange flavor beef, pizza, and peppermint. Under "pasta" we find "see also macaroni". But my favorite index entry is "kludges", which directs us to pages 1 through 971; which is, of course, the entire body of the book, excluding index and appendices. Steele obviously decided to have a little fun, which is understandable considering how dry such books tend to be.

But, before you click this book into your shopping cart, you should realize that the complete text is available on-line, and for free. I'm not sure how Steele swung this with the publisher, but it's out there in the public domain. Finally, I should point out that there are a number of excellent free Common Lisp interpreters available for many different platforms. The best I have found is CLISP, which is maintained primarily by Bruno Haible through the GNU Project. It's reasonably complete and robust.

Happy hacking. May cons be with you.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Still a great reference, April 5, 2000

By	Bradford W. Miller "AI Hacker" (Narragansett, RI USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Common LISP. The Language. Second Edition (Paperback)

While you can use the online ANSI HyperSpec, there are still several Common Lisps which are not fully conformant, and used CLtL/2 as their base. For these Lisps, this book is a must.

In general, I think this book makes a much better reference than the HyperSpec, and I don't think any other book I've seen can compare. GLS is a terrific writer - very clear with a dry sense of humor that pervades the book, and has a number of useful examples. While there are many parts of Common Lisp that can be difficult to comprehend at first glance (e.g., backquotes) GLS's presentation brings a clarity to the effort that makes it a pleasure to read (and in the case of FORMAT, read again and again! ;-)

Read the index carefully for additional humor! END

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good reference, June 12, 2001

By	Dr. Lee D. Carlson (Baltimore, Maryland USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Common LISP. The Language. Second Edition (Paperback)

This book is an excellent reference book on Common Lisp and will serve the experienced Lisp programmer well in that regard. The author has meticulously documented the features of Common Lisp and its relation with other Lisp dialects, such as MacLisp. Readers who know Lisp only marginally can also benefit from the book, for example computer scientists or logicians with a background in lambda calculus, or programmers with a background in functional or logical programming. Users of Mathematica, Reduce, or Maple could also use the book profitably, as it gives insight on the origin of some of the function calls and syntax in these high-level symbolic programming languages. The size of the book prohibits a per-chapter review, but some highlights of the book include the discussion on data types and scoping in the first two chapters. The author summarizes effectively the kinds of scope in Common Lisp. The program structure in Lisp, namely the organization of a program as a function call or a form is outlined in detail. It is this program structure I believe that gives Lisp its power and makes it a more natural language in which to program, at least from a purely mathematical standpoint. The author stresses that function application is the primary method for generating Lisp programs. In addition, the author shows in detail how a function in Lisp can compute several objects and return them; and here again, the approach taken by Lisp is much cleaner from a mathematical perspective than the one taken by other programming languages.

A very good overview of how Common Lisp represents numbers is also given in the book. The discussion is supplemented with a treatment of complex functions and many graphs are given illustrating their behavior, the graphs being generated by PostScript code by Common Lisp code. Also, there is a useful discussion of hashing in and how to implement user-defined structures in Common Lisp.

Also quite interesting is the discussion on the object-oriented extension to Common Lisp called the Common Lisp Object System (CLOS), which is based on generic functions, multiple inheritance, declarative method combination, and a meta-object protocol. The fundamental objects of CLOS are classes, instances, generic functions, and methods, and the author discusses each of these in detail. The use of CLOS has become important recently in the area of constraint programming and its applications.