Common Lispa Gentle Introduction To Symbolic Computation

Common Lisp a Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation by DavidTouretzky? of Carnegie Mellon University.

Introductory text on CommonLisp for "students taking their first programming course, ... psychologists, linguists, and other persons interested in Artificial Intelligence, ... and computer hobbyists." While especially useful for those approaching Lisp as their first computer programming language, it may also be helpful to those well entrenched in a strict object-oriented paradigm.

Full text (587 pages) freely available on Web in PS or PDF.

http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/LispBook/index.html

Original publication (Harper & Row, 1984) predates ANSI standardization of CommonLisp, but no major problems noted in working exercises (answers in Appendix C), as clear discussion and examples stick to well-established core of what shortly later became the language standard.

Interestingly, author notes it is as easy to teach (and learn) such a coherent subset of Lisp as all of Scheme:

: "Some people prefer to teach Scheme in introductory courses because it is so much smaller than Common Lisp. But one can easily teach the subset of Common Lisp that is equivalent to Scheme, so language size isn't really an issue for beginners. A more compelling argument is that there is a certain style of applicative programming, making heavy use of lexical closures, that can be expressed more elegantly in Scheme syntax. But there are also areas where Common Lisp is superior to Scheme, such as its support for user defined macros, its elegant unification of lists and vectors into a sequence datatype, and its use of keyword arguments to greatly extend the utility of the sequence functions. The combination of tremendous power, extensive manufacturer support, and a built-in object-oriented programming facility make Common Lisp the only industrial strength Lisp. Although this book does emphasize a side-effect-free, applicative approach to programming with which Scheme afficionados will feel quite at home, it does so in purely Common Lisp style."

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