MCL

Volume Number: 9

Issue Number: 1

Column Tag: Tools of the trade

Macintosh Common Lisp

MCL - a powerful development environment often overlooked by

Macintosh programmers

By Michael S. Engber, The Institute for the Learning Sciences,

Northwestern University

Abstract:

Macintosh Common LISP (MCL) is a powerful development environment which is

often overlooked by Macintosh programmers. This article will show why you should

consider using MCL, and explore some of the ways it can enhance your productivity.

Prior LISP or MCL experience is not assumed.

This article is aimed at the typical Mac developer who uses C or Pascal. I am

going to try to avoid arguing the general merits of LISP versus other programming

languages. There is already plenty written on this topic. Instead, I will emphasize

aspects of MCL and LISP most relevant to Mac development.

Languages are a religious issue among programmers and opinions about LISP are

even more polarized than most. So I would like to apologize in advance for the editorial

and first person comments, but one of my purposes is to get you to overcome any

prejudice you have and take a closer look at Macintosh Common LISP. I could present

just the cold facts, but that is not likely to be any more informative than reading the

manual.

“LISP, doesn’t that stand for Lots of Infernal Stupid Parentheses?”

If you are like most programmers, you probably regard LISP as a toy language,

something you used years ago to do a few AI assignments. You were probably fluent in

Pascal or C at the time, so LISP was an obstacle which made otherwise simple

programs more difficult. That was certainly my experience. At the University of

Wisconsin, we had a cluster of thirty or so Xerox Dandelions whose CRTs put out

enough heat to keep the lab at 90 degrees in the dead of winter. Apart from Phys. Ed.,

Intro to AI was the only course which required changing into a t-shirt and shorts.

Ignoring the physical environment, just the simple act of logging in took forever.

Using the editor was difficult at best; and as for saving your files, don’t even ask.

So, if you already have a bad taste in your mouth from LISP, let me start by

assuring you that MCL is very easy to use. A novice can write “hello, world” faster in

MCL than in any other Mac development environment - even THINK Pascal. All one has

to do is type (print “hello, world”) and hit return. There are no libraries to include

and no compilation scripts to run. Just type in the code and let MCL evaluate it.