Common Lisp - Comparison With Other Lisps

Comparison With Other Lisps

Common Lisp is most frequently compared with, and contrasted to, Scheme—if only because they are the two most popular Lisp dialects. Scheme predates CL, and comes not only from the same Lisp tradition but from some of the same engineers—Guy L. Steele, with whom Gerald Jay Sussman designed Scheme, chaired the standards committee for Common Lisp.

Common Lisp is a general-purpose programming language, in contrast to Lisp variants such as Emacs Lisp and AutoLISP which are embedded extension languages in particular products. Unlike many earlier Lisps, Common Lisp (like Scheme) uses lexical variable scope by default for both interpreted and compiled code.

Most of the Lisp systems whose designs contributed to Common Lisp—such as ZetaLisp and Franz Lisp—used dynamically scoped variables in their interpreters and lexically scoped variables in their compilers. Scheme introduced the sole use of lexically scoped variables to Lisp; an inspiration from ALGOL 68 which was widely recognized as a good idea. CL supports dynamically scoped variables as well, but they must be explicitly declared as "special". There are no differences in scoping between ANSI CL interpreters and compilers.

Common Lisp is sometimes termed a Lisp-2 and Scheme a Lisp-1, referring to CL's use of separate namespaces for functions and variables. (In fact, CL has many namespaces, such as those for go tags, block names, and loop keywords). There is a long-standing controversy between CL and Scheme advocates over the tradeoffs involved in multiple namespaces. In Scheme, it is (broadly) necessary to avoid giving variables names which clash with functions; Scheme functions frequently have arguments named lis, lst, or lyst so as not to conflict with the system function list. However, in CL it is necessary to explicitly refer to the function namespace when passing a function as an argument—which is also a common occurrence, as in the sort example above.

CL also differs from Scheme in its handling of boolean values. Scheme uses the special values #t and #f to represent truth and falsity. CL follows the older Lisp convention of using the symbols T and NIL, with NIL standing also for the empty list. In CL, any non-NIL value is treated as true by conditionals, such as if, whereas in Scheme all non-#f values are treated as true. These conventions allow some operators in both languages to serve both as predicates (answering a boolean-valued question) and as returning a useful value for further computation, but in Scheme the value ' which is equivalent to NIL in Common Lisp evaluates to true in a boolean expression.

Lastly, the Scheme standards documents require tail-call optimization, which the CL standard does not. Most CL implementations do offer tail-call optimization, although often only when the programmer uses an optimization directive. Nonetheless, common CL coding style does not favor the ubiquitous use of recursion that Scheme style prefers—what a Scheme programmer would express with tail recursion, a CL user would usually express with an iterative expression in do, dolist, loop, or (more recently) with the iterate package.