Practical Lisp for Programmers

No credit.	Prof. Larry Hunter
Practical Lisp for Programmers	SoM #2817b
PORTL (School of Medicine room 1644)	315-1094
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 11:00am-12:30pm	Larry.Hunter@ucdenver.edu
Office hours by appointment	http://compbio.ucdenver.edu/hunter

Important Notices

This course was taught in the summer of 2003. It may resume one of these days....

Course description

This course is an introduction to the facilities, style and modern usage of the programming language Common Lisp.

Why lisp? Not only is it one of the main languages that our tools have been written in, it's a great language for other reasons. You can look at a powerpoint presentation I gave last year about why I think lisp is worth learning.

Goals for the course: This class assumes you are already a pretty good programmer in another language (e.g. C, Java, perl) and know about things like types, data structures, functions, etc. You will come away with an understanding of how to write and understand idiomatic lisp code, and with an appreciation of some of the advantages that lisp has to offer over other programming languages. We will cover at least briefly most of the built-in functions that common lisp offers, and some useful extensions to the ANSI language (including web and network tools, system definition facilities, and interfaces to external databases). We will also cover practical issues such as debugging, optimization, and interfaces with code written in other languages.

Course Requirements:

Prerequisites: Experience in programming, preferably in C, Java or a similar language. PERL scripting barely counts. Some knowledge of computer science. For example, you should be able to define and/or implement: a linked list, computational complexity, a data structure, an O(n log n) sort algorithm, a recursive program, etc.
Computational: Access to a computer with an internet connection. I prefer you use an linux/intel machine for several reasons:
- Our Allegro CL site license covers them
- I don't know much about windows, and can't help you as well.
- The machines I can give you access to (such as compbio) are linux/intel.
However, if you insist on using a windows machine, you can get the Trial Version of Allegro Common Lisp for windows from Franz's download site, and emacs and ILISP from the other sources mentioned. You are on your own for getting emacs to run under windows, but it shouldn't be too hard. Try looking at Bill Clementson's CL on Windows Cookbook. Clementson says that the Windows trial version doesn't work with ILISP, but he suggests some alternative common lisp implementations that do. Or check out the list of implementations at the lisp.org web site. Once you have lisp running inside emacs/ILISP, there should be few noticable differences between the linux and windows versions.

Course materials

Here are sources for materials you will need to do this course. Things that are restricted to our site (like the license file for ACL) will only be accessible from a UCHSC IP address.

Common Lisp:Get a lisp installation by recursively copying (using scp as necessary) /net/compbio/usr/local/src/acl62. Or go to the Franz download site. I believe (but haven't tested) that if you download the linux/intel trial version and replace the license file with our site license, you get a fully functional install.
Licensing: If you ended up with a version of ACL without a license (or with the trial license), you can use the devel.lic license file for our site license. This is good on linux/intel for any CU-related purpose. It's only downloadable from machines with a CU IP address... Misuse of this file infringes on our license agreement with Franz, so don't do it.
Emacs: You need a version of emacs to use as the basis for the ILISP development environment. Either FSF emacs or XEmacs are fine. Xemacs comes with ILISP installed already.
Emacs keybindings: You probably want to define a few keybindings in your own .emacs (or .xemacs/init.el). A good starting point is:
(setq ilisp-*use-fsf-compliant-keybindings* t) (global-set-key [f6] 'allegro) (global-set-key [f12] 'acldoc)
which says to use the new FSF compliant keybindings for ILISP, to make F6 start (or continue) a lisp session, and f12 start browsing documentation. This will make more sense after you read the ILISP documentation, or you can just do it. Feel free to pick your own keys. Read the emacs documentation about keybindings if you want to do fancier things (use the info pages, ^h-i, to get started).
ILISP is an emacs package that makes editing lisp code and interactive with lisp listeners easy. You need the most current CVS snapshot (rather than the released version) since there was a bug that related to ACL 6.2 (the version we are using) that was just fixed. Assuming your system has CVS installed, cd to the directory you want ILISP installed in (/usr/local/share/emacs/site-lisp is a good choice) and do
cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.ilisp.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/ilisp login cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.ilisp.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/ilisp co ILISP
Just give an empty password (hit return) if prompted for one when you log in to the cvs host. Then you need to configure your emacs so that it loads ILISP automatically. If the directory where you put the ILISP installation is in the emacs load path, you can just add
(require 'ilisp) (setq allegro-program "/usr/local/src/acl62/mlisp")
(or wherever your lisp binary happens to live) to the /usr/local/share/emacs/site-lisp/site-start.el file. When you first start ilisp (by typing M-x allegro to emacs), it may complain that initialization files are not compiled. Assuming you have write permission to the directory where ilisp lives, you can just type M-x ilisp-compile-inits and that will be fixed. (N.B. XEmacs comes with ilisp as an XEmacs package. Install the new version of ilisp over the old one, by default in /usr/local/lib/xemacs/xemacs-packages/lisp)
acldoc is an emacs package that I wrote to make browsing the ACL documentation tree easier. It's available as http://compbio.ucdenver.edu/hunter/acldoc.el. As with ILISP, just put it in the emacs load path, and do a (require 'acldoc) in site-start.el (or in your own .emacs or .xemacs/init.el).

If you want to avoid all of this installation stuff (the experience may be useful later, though), just use emacs on compbio, which, other than the keybindings (which are specific to a particular user) is all set up. You can also use compbio as an example to crib from; look at the following directories on compbio:

/usr/local/src/acl62
/usr/local/src/ilisp
/usr/local/share/emacs/site-lisp, particularly the file site-start.el in that directory.

There is an XEmacs install on hal, which shows how to do it for XEmacs, although there are a few minor differences here and there between what I describe here and how hal is set up.

Lectures & Transcripts

Below are the lecture notes and transcripts of sessions that I do during class.

Getting started: installation, symbols and variables powerpoint transcript
Defstruct and functions powerpoint transcript
Conses, equality, conditionals, files powerpoint transcript The foo.lisp file.
Graphs, circular lists, hashtables, multiple-values, iteration constructs (dotimes, dolist, map) transcript
DO, streams, with-open-file, read-*, format, position*, the lex-string program transcript
Packages, declare/declaim/proclaim, adjustable arrays (& buffered reads), the unoptimized egome program transcript
Debugger, profiler, optimization. Some additional notes on the example in class. The optimized egome program, transcript