An overview of COMMON LISP

A dialect of LISP called “COMMON LISP” is being cooperatively developed and implemented at several sites. It is a descendant of the MACLISP family of LISP dialects, and is intended to unify the several divergent efforts of the last five years. We first give an extensive history of LISP, particularly of the MACLISP branch, in order to explain in context the motivation for COMMON LISP. We enumerate the goals and non-goals of the language design, discuss the language features of primary interest, and then consider how these features help to meet the expressed goals. Finally, the status (as of May 1982) of six implementations of COMMON LISP is summarized.