blog.sanium.net

First things first, getting a lisp development environment set up. After looking around the web for a while, I arrived on SLIME: The Superior Lisp Interaction Mode for Emacs. Installing everything’s pretty simple, mostly because there’s really nothing too much to install.

I’m using GNU Clisp 2.39, GNU Emacs 21.3 and SLIME 2.0.

Simply unzip these where ever you want, in my case I put them all in c:\lisp
At this point, if you read the helpful README file, you’ll be told to put the following code into ~/.emacs

   (add-to-list 'load-path "~/hacking/lisp/slime/")  ; your SLIME directory
   (setq inferior-lisp-program "/opt/sbcl/bin/sbcl") ; your Lisp system
   (require 'slime)
   (slime-setup)

The only problem is, where is this .emacs file? And what slashes do we use in windows?
The answer to the first question is trivial, let emacs find it for you. The second, use forward slashes.

1. run “runemacs.exe”


2. use the C-x C-f (ctrl+x, then ctrl+f) command to open ~/.emacs


3. copy and paste the above into it (C-y is equivalent to pasting in emacs)


4. replace the default paths with your own paths, in my case, they are: c:/Lisp/slime-2.0 and c:/Lisp/clisp-239/clisp.exe


5. save the file using C-x C-s. (it turns out the file is created at c:\.emacs)

Now that you have everything set up, restart emacs (I’m not sure if this is required, I just restarted it) and start slime using M-x slime (alt+x, then type "slime"), if everything’s successful, you should see a Lisp interpreter console waiting for you.

As for me, I’m going through the (free online) book Practical Common Lisp by Peter Seibel.