Preface
I wrote this book to help teach LISP to students in a course on data structures. Consequently it
contains a careful description of the data structures manipulated by LISP functions. These data
structures and others, notably hash tables, are also used in constructing a LISP interpreter. I wish
to acknowledge the help of my students in shaping and debugging this material.
The study of LISP, coupled with the study of a LISP interpreter intended for exhibition, is of
special interest to students in the areas of programming languages and computer architecture as
well as data structures. Indeed, I hope this book will be useful to students in all areas of computer
science, and I also hope it will be useful to autodidacts, professional programmers, and computer
enthusiasts in a wide variety of fields.
This book is intended to be accessible to a wide range of interested readers from high school
students through professional programmers. I would very much like to see students use this book
to help them understand LISP interpreters, and thus understand the concepts involved in building
an interpreter for any language. The best way to proceed is to compile and run the C LISP
interpreter, and then experiment by modifying it in various ways. Finally, I hope this book can
help all who use it develop an aesthetic appreciation of this elegant programming language.
Copies of this little book in PDF format, together with the LISP interpreter source code and
ancillary files, can be found at www.civilized.com.
Gary Knott
Civilized Software, Inc.
12109 Heritage Park Circle
Silver Spring, Maryland 20906
phone:1-(301)-962-3711
email:knott@civilized.com
URL:http://www.civilized.com
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