LispWorks User Guide and Reference Manual

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Preface

About this manual

This manual contains a user guide section (previously published separately as the LispWorks User Guide ) and a reference section (previously the LispWorks Reference Manual ).

User Guide section

The user guide section of this manual describes the main language-level features and tools available in LispWorks, and how to use them.

These chapters describe the central programming tools and features in LispWorks:

The next chapter, Customization of LispWorks, explains how to perform some commonly required customizations, such as controlling start-up appearance of LispWorks.

The remaining user guide chapters describe features of specialist interest:

Please note that documentation for Graphics Ports is in the LispWorks CAPI User Guide and LispWorks CAPI Reference Manual .

Reference section

Most of the reference section is organized by package: each chapter contains reference material for the exported symbols in a given package. The chapters are organized alphabetically by package name.

Generally one chapter covers each package, but the WIN32 package symbols are split into four chapters, and the last chapter contains reference material for C functions. Within each chapter, the symbols are organized alphabetically (ignoring non-alphanumeric characters that are common in Lisp symbols, such as *). The chapters are:

Many of these reference chapters should be used in conjunction with corresponding chapters in the user guide section. Reference material for some aspects of LispWorks can be found in other manuals.

The LispWorks manuals

The LispWorks manual set comprises the following books:

The LispWorks manuals are all available in Portable Documentation Format (PDF). You can use Adobe Reader to browse the PDF documentation online or to print it. Adobe Reader is available for free download from Adobe's web site at www.adobe.com .

The LispWorks manuals are also available in HTML format. Commands in the Help menu of any of the LispWorks IDE tools give you direct access to the HTML documentation, using your web browser. Details of how to use these commands can be found in the LispWorks IDE User Guide .

Please let us know if you find any mistakes in the LispWorks documentation, or if you have any suggestions for improvements.

Other documentation

The LispWorks manuals do not attempt to describe Lisp itself. For definitive information on Common Lisp, including CLOS, consult the American National Standard X3.226 for Common Lisp. An HTML version of this document is supplied with LispWorks and can be accessed from the Help menu.

For information on CLOS, Sonya E. Keene's book Object-Oriented Programming in Common Lisp: A Programmers' Guide is very helpful. This book is published by Addison-Wesley.

For an account of Metaobject protocols as well as a detailed study of an implementation of CLOS see Kiczales, Rivieres and Bobrow, The Art of the Meta-Object Protocol , published by MIT Press, often referred to as AMOP. The LispWorks MOP mostly conforms chapters 5 & 6 of AMOP; the differences are mentioned here in The Metaobject Protocol.

Notation and conventions

Throughout this manual you will find references such as "... the LispWorks file foo/bar.lisp ...". This means a file bar.lisp in a subdirectory foo of the LispWorks library directory. You can obtain the full path of such a file by evaluating this form in your LispWorks image:

(sys:lispworks-file "foo/bar.lisp")

The LispWorks manuals follow the notation used in Common Lisp: the Language (2nd Edition).

Please note that your windows may differ in some respects from the illustrations given in the LispWorks manuals. This is because some details are controlled by the window manager that you are using, not by LispWorks itself.


LispWorks User Guide and Reference Manual - 22 Dec 2009

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