In computing, CLISP is a programming language originally developed by Bruno Haible and Michael Stoll for the Atari ST. Today it supports Unix and Microsoft Windows systems.

CLISP is an implementation of Common Lisp, including an interpreter and a bytecode compiler, as well as a debugger, a socket interface, a high-level foreign language interface, strong internationalization support, and object systems (CLOS and MOP).

CLISP is written in C and Common Lisp. CLISP is now part of the GNU Project and is free software, available under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).

History

Haible did not originally intend to distribute CLISP under the GPL, but in a well-publicised email exchange with Richard Stallman, he eventually agreed to do so. The issue at stake was whether CLISP was a derivative work of the GNU readline library.^[1]

Ports

CLISP is extremely portable, running on almost all Unix-based operating systems as well as on Microsoft Windows. Although interpreting bytecode is usually slower than running compiled native binaries, this is not always a major issue (especially in applications like Web development where I/O is the bottleneck).

Adoption

Paul Graham used CLISP to run the software for his Viaweb startup. Viaweb was an early web application; portions of it still exist as Yahoo! Stores, the base for Yahoo Shopping.

References

External links

• CLISP homepage
• Clisp article on CLIKI

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