Common Lisp Documentation

The Common Lisp HyperSpec 

The Common Lisp HyperSpec™ is the acclaimed online version of the ANSI Common Lisp Standard, suitable for LispWorks users. The HyperSpec is derived from the official standard with permission from ANSI and INCITS (previously known as X3). It contains the full text of the ANSI standard and ancillary information.

The Common Lisp HyperSpec was prepared (1996) and revised (2005) by Kent Pitman. As Project Editor of X3J13 Kent Pitman managed the completion of the document which became the ANSI Common Lisp Standard.

The ANSI Common Lisp standard contains nearly 1100 pages describing nearly a thousand functions and variables in sufficient detail to accommodate hosting of the language on a wide variety of hardware and operating system platforms.

While the ANSI document remains the official standard, we think that in practice you'll find the Common Lisp HyperSpec much easier to navigate and use than its paper/PDF alternative.

In addition to the Common Lisp standard itself, the Common Lisp HyperSpec also incorporates interesting and useful cross references to other materials of the Common Lisp committee, J13 (formerly X3J13).

The Common Lisp HyperSpec consumes just over 15MB of disk storage in about 2300 files. It contains approximately 105,000 hyperlinks!

This HTML document may, subject to certain conditions, be downloaded for use at other locations.

The Common Lisp Standard

The document ANSI INCITS 226-1994 (formerly ANSI X3.226:1994) American National Standard for Programming Language Common LISP is the official standard, available on paper here. Here is a PDF version.

CLtL2

Common Lisp, the Language (2nd edition)

This is the book which preceded the ANSI specification for Common Lisp. It is more useful for Liquid Common Lisp.