Lisp Lore A Guide To Programming The Lisp Machine

This book had its genesis in the following piece of computer mail: From allegra!joan-b Tue Dec 18 09:15:54 1984 To: sola!hjb Subject: lispm Hank, I've been talking with Mark Plotnik and Bill Gale about asking you to conduct a basic course on using the lisp machine. Mark, for instance, would really like to cover basics like the flavor system, etc., so he could start doing his own programming without a lot of trial and error, and Bill and I would be interested in this, too. I'm quite sure that Mark Jones, Bruce, Eric and Van would also be really interested. Would you like to do it? Bill has let me know that if you'd care to set something up, he's free to meet with us anytime this week or next (although I'll only be here on Wed. next week) so we can come up with a plan. What do you think? Joan.

Here is a presentation of LISP which is both practical and theoretical. For the practical, the syntax of the language, the programming styles, and the semantics of computation are carefully developed. For the theoretical, the algebra of interpreters, the lambda calculus as a foundation for LISP, and the algebraic significance of LISP's approach to artificial intelligence are discussed. As the title suggests, the book reaches beyond the technical side of LISP to present colorful applications, historical comments and quotations, computational philosophy, consequences of LISP's exceptional power, and much more. The material has been designed to appeal to a variety of readers, from the bright freshman to the practicing professional, and from computer scientists and mathematicians to chemists, engineers, and philosophers.

With a focus on educational computing, this book examines how technological practices align with or subvert existing forms of dominance. Examines the important question: Is the enormous financial investment school districts are making in computing technology a good idea?

The defacto standard - a must-have for all LISP programmers. In this greatly expanded edition of the defacto standard, you'll learn about the nearly 200 changes already made since original publication - and find out about gray areas likely to be revised later. Written by the Vice- Chairman of X3J13 (the ANSI committee responsible for the standardization of Common Lisp) and co-developer of the language itself, the new edition contains the entire text of the first edition plus six completely new chapters. They cover: - CLOS, the Common Lisp Object System, with new features to support function overloading and object-oriented programming, plus complete technical specifications * Loops, a powerful control structure for multiple variables * Conditions, a generalization of the error signaling mechanism * Series and generators * Plus other subjects not part of the ANSI standards but of interest to professional programmers. Throughout, you'll find fresh examples, additional clarifications, warnings, and tips - all presented with the author's customary vigor and wit.

This third edition is a revised and expanded version of Winston and Horn's best-selling introduction to the LISP programming language and to LISP-based applications, many of which are possible as a result of advances in Artificial Intelligence technology.

As artificial intelligence (AI) is applied to more complex problems and a wider set of applications, the ability to take advantage of the computational power of distributed and parallel hardware architectures and to match these architec tures with the inherent distributed aspects of applications (spatial, functional, or temporal) has become an important research issue. Out of these research concerns, an AI subdiscipline called distributed problem solving has emerged. Distributed problem-solving systems are broadly defined as loosely-coupled, distributed networks of semi-autonomous problem-solving agents that perform sophisticated problem solving and cooperatively interact to solve problems. N odes operate asynchronously and in parallel with limited internode commu nication. Limited internode communication stems from either inherent band width limitations of the communication medium or from the high computa tional cost of packaging and assimilating information to be sent and received among agents. Structuring network problem solving to deal with consequences oflimited communication-the lack of a global view and the possibility that the individual agents may not have all the information necessary to accurately and completely solve their subproblems-is one of the major focuses of distributed problem-solving research. It is this focus that also is one of the important dis tinguishing characteristics of distributed problem-solving research that sets it apart from previous research in AI.

Here is a presentation of LISP which is both practical and theoretical. For the practical, the syntax of the language, the programming styles, and the semantics of computation are carefully developed. For the theoretical, the algebra of interpreters, the lambda calculus as a foundation for LISP, and the algebraic significance of LISP's approach to artificial intelligence are discussed. As the title suggests, the book reaches beyond the technical side of LISP to present colorful applications, historical comments and quotations, computational philosophy, consequences of LISP's exceptional power, and much more. The material has been designed to appeal to a variety of readers, from the bright freshman to the practicing professional, and from computer scientists and mathematicians to chemists, engineers, and philosophers.