四大LISP方言的比较

If you've used Lisp in the past, you may have ideas about what "Lisp" is that have little to do with Common Lisp. While Common Lisp supplanted most of the dialects it's descended from, it isn't the only remaining Lisp dialect, and depending on where and when you were exposed to Lisp, you may very well have learned one of these other dialects.

Other than Common Lisp, the one general-purpose Lisp dialect that still has an active user community is Scheme. Common Lisp borrowed a few important features from Scheme but never intended to replace it.

Originally designed at M.I.T., where it was quickly put to use as a teaching language for undergraduate computer science courses, Scheme has always been aimed at a different language niche than Common Lisp. In particular, Scheme's designers have focused on keeping the core language as small and as simple as possible. This has obvious benefits for a teaching language and also for programming language researchers who like to be able to formally prove things about languages.

It also has the benefit of making it relatively easy to understand the whole language as specified in the standard. But, it does so at the cost of omitting many useful features that are standardized in Common Lisp. Individual Scheme implementations may provide these features in implementation-specific ways, but their omission from the standard makes it harder to write portable Scheme code than to write portable Common Lisp code.

Scheme also emphasizes a functional programming style and the use of recursion much more than Common Lisp does. If you studied Lisp in college and came away with the impression that it was only an academic language with no real-world application, chances are you learned Scheme. This isn't to say that's a particularly fair characterization of Scheme, but it's even less applicable to Common Lisp, which was expressly designed to be a real-world engineering language rather than a theoretically "pure" language.

If you've learned Scheme, you should also be aware that a number of subtle differences between Scheme and Common Lisp may trip you up. These differences are also the basis for several perennial religious wars between the hotheads in the Common Lisp and Scheme communities. I'll try to point out some of the more important differences as we go along.

Two other Lisp dialects still in widespread use are Elisp, the extension language for the Emacs editor, and Autolisp, the extension language for Autodesk's AutoCAD computer-aided design tool. Although it's possible more lines of Elisp and Autolisp have been written than of any other dialect of Lisp, neither can be used outside their host application, and both are quite old-fashioned Lisps compared to either Scheme or Common Lisp. If you've used one of these dialects, prepare to hop in the Lisp time machine and jump forward several decades.

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