Teach yourself (Eu)Lisp

The only (intended) assumption is that you have programmed before, having (preferably) taken a course in C, Pascal, Modula or Ada.

If you have any comments about the organisation of these pages, any suggestions for additional topics, or, best of all, new exercises, please send me (Julian Padget) mail.

Here are the basic topics:

• introduction and a little history
• constants:
  • strings, numbers, characters and vectors,
  • some unusual constants,
  • and a self-assessment exercise. Note: if your browser has the facility to clone a window (eg. Mosaic) you may find it more convenient to work on the exercise in one window while referring back to the different sections of the text in another.
• expressions:
  • quoted expressions,
  • simple expressions,
  • conditional expressions,
  • local declarations,
  • assignment and blocks,
  • and a self-assessment exercise.
• functions:
  • defining functions
  • anonymous functions
  • recursion and iteration
  • defining local functions
  • and a self-assessment exercise.
• collections (note: this part is not yet complete):
  • generic operations
  • lists
  • vector
  • string
  • table
• arithmetic (note: this part is not yet complete)
• comparing objects (note: this part is not yet complete)

Lisp is not one language, but a (vast) family. The remainder of this course is writ- ten specifically in terms of a particular member of that family, which is called EuLisp. There are three things that make EuLisp distinctive: modules, objects and light-weight processes. At this point we introduce another requirement of the reader, namely familiarity with the definition of datatypes and some passing acquaintance with the terms used in object-oriented languages.

• modules
• objects
  • class definitions
  • generic functions and methods
• light-weight processes