1.1 About Common Lisp

1.1.1 The language

Common Lisp is a functional, or applicative, language; that is, it exchanges data by using return values rather than temporary storage. It has two salient features--a list-based representation of data and an evaluator, or interpreter, that treats some lists as programs.

Lisp functions are equivalent to subroutines or procedures in other languages. In contrast to most other languages, Lisp functions can create and return arbitrary data objects as their values. These data objects can then be passed as arguments to other functions.

Programs and data have the same form in Lisp, and thus Lisp programs can easily process other Lisp programs. A program is a sequence of expressions composed of function calls.

While iteration, or looping, as a control structure is common in most programming languages, Lisp makes extensive use of recursion. Recursive functions are functions that call themselves.

The User's Guide - 9 SEP 1996

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