Common Lisp Tools

• Develop Programs:
  • Editors, for writing code,
  • Debuggers, for examing program state,
  • Profiling, for collecting performance data and benchmarking.
  • Testing,
  • CASE Computer Aided Software Engineering, source code display, help facilities, and other programming environment tools.
• Work with Graphics, Windows and the World-Wide-Web:
  • WWW Toolkits,
  • GUI Toolkits,
  • GUI Builders,
  • Graphics/Image Processing Packages
  • Multimedia
• Use existing utilities for
  • Mathematics,
  • Algorithms, such as completion, pattern matching and searching, node tracing, and data type manipulations.
  • Resource Management, such as autoloading, memoization, etc.
  • Object Oriented Programming (CLOS),
  • Logic Programming, Inference Engines and Agents,
  • Databases,
  • Syntax,
  • Music
  • Standards: things which are in Common Lisp but not in all Lisp implementations.
  • Others.
• and there are Collections, Archives and Repositories

The Lisp FAQ provides another listing (which should be merged into this one).

There is also a collection of notes about various kinds of computations in Lisp at the CMU Common Lisp Repository

Programming Tools

• Emacs (or one of its many look-alikes) is the editor favored by most Lisp programmers. Emacs is written in elisp. It is available by here and from many site mirrors. Emacs is produced by the Free Software Foundation.
• Hemlock is a kind of Emacs written in Common Lisp. It is available in the extra file of the CMU CL distribution.
• ILisp provides very tight integration between Emacs and almost any other Common Lisp, including the ability to run a Common Lisp from within an editor buffer.
• cl-shell provides the ability to run a Common Lisp from within an editor buffer.
• Emacs info (hypertext documentation system) files for GCL.
• Tags creates a tagfile from Lisp source for use with vi.

• Alerts are a convenient debugging status indicator.
• Step is a portable code single-stepper and debugger from U. Waikato, New Zealand.

• Benchmarking Suites including those by Gabriel, Fateman and Acuff, can be used to compare different implementations.
• The metering facilities from CMU provide profiling tools.

• Dick Water's coverage analysis code can be used to determine which conditional paths of a program are exercised by a given test suite.
• The regression tester provides a set of tools for defining and running a test suite.

• The Common Lisp HyperSpec contains the material of the ANSI standard for Common Lisp as web-browsable hypertext. See the Lisp references page for more documentation links.
• The Editors tools section, above, contains listings of documentation interfaces to the Emacs text editor.
• CMU has two portable system definition utilties, loosely modeled on the Symbolics System Construction Tools. Another is included with PCL.
• lisp-doc package for creating documentation from source code using inverse literate programming.
• TeX style macros for formatting Lisp code.
• VGrind/TGrind entries for Common Lisp.
• An Eiffel-style Design by Contract facility for CLOS. A short introduction to Design by Contract.

Graphics/Windows/Web

• CL-HTTP is a WWW server from the MIT AI lab.
• SGML2Lisp is a SGML output formatting tool.

• The CLIM library at CMU, and Free-CLIM home both give Common Lisp Interface Manager code and documentation.
• CLM, GINA, and IB: Common Lisp Motif, Generic INteractive Application, and Interface Builder.
• CLUE and CLIO: Common Lisp User-Interface Environment and Common Lisp Interactive Objects.
• Common Windows: Information about Allegro Common Windows
• EW: Express Windows
• GARNET: One of the biggest and best GUIs for Lisp. is a UI toolkit. It is not under active development anymore. A repository is also at CMU.
• LispView: A GUI that doesn't use CLX.
• Lispworks Information about Lispworks Toolkit
• Lisp2wish: Simple demo of synchronous communication between Lisp and Tcl/Tk
• Winterp: Widget INTERPreter
• XIT: X User Interface Toolkit
• XPCE is an object-oriented X window interface for symbolic languages such as Lisp, from the University of Amsterdam.
• XWIN: Simple X windows for text output from Lisp
• YY: Network oriented window toolkit for Common Lisp.

• Picasso: Graphical User Interface Development System
• Some of the GUI Toolkits listed above include interactive GUI builders as well.

• Quail is a quantitative programming environment with an extensive graphics package.
• The CMU repository has simple graphers that run in most of the GUIs.

• SK8 is a mature authoring environment from Apple, that runs in MCL.

Libraries

• Mockmma is a mock-up of Mathematica -- an algebraic processing system.
• Quail is a quantitative programming environment from the University of Waterloo.
• CMU's math library has code for various mathematical functions.

• Completion of partial strings against a dictionary.
• Pattern matching code, unifiers, regular expression matchers.
• Searching code.
• Tables unifies the interface to various table-like data structures.
• Trees, including Binary Search Trees, Priority Queues, and Red-Black Trees.
• Type simplifier.
  • Resources
  • Initialization feature of Lisp machines.
  • Memoization
  • Autoload function definitions from a file upon function call.
  Object Oriented Programming (CLOS)
  • CLOS Repository at CMU.
  • Copy-Objects: Copying CLOS/PCL objects.
  • OMG IDL Lisp Language Mapping: Information on the CORBA IDL mapping for Common Lisp.
  • ILU: Xerox PARC's CORBA-like Inter-Language Unification.
    • LISA (Lisp-based Intelligent Software Agents) is a production rule system for Common Lisp. Its purpose is to provide extensive support for the development of intelligent applications. LISA employs a CLOS implementation of Rete and is based on CLIPS and JESS.
    • Screamer adds nondeterministic programming to Common Lisp. An entire tool repository for Screamer is available maintained by Jonathan Kaye. Screamer was written by Jeffrey Mark Siskind.
    • Ontolingua is an ontology editor from Stanford. The source code is apparently no longer available, but the editor can be used at the above URL if you have any ontologies that need editing.
    • The Don Theorem Prover is first-order predicate calculus inference engine from Stanford.
    • Epilog is a model elimination inference engine for Stanford.
    • Prologic inference system from Stanford.
    • CLOS Frames.
    • CSP: Prosser's hybrid algorithms for the Constraint Satisfaction Problem
    • Magenta is an agent-oriented programming system from Stanford.
    • LOOM is a knowledge representation language implemented on top of Common Lisp. It belongs to the family of KL-ONE-like languages and can be seen as an example of a next generation OOP language which mixes logical and object-oriented paradigms.
    • Babylon a modular, configurable, hybrid environment for developing expert systems. The shell is implemented and embedded in Common Lisp.
    • The Birmingham Sim_agent toolkit for exploring architectures for interacting simulated agents. See also, Riccardo Poli's co-evolution experiment.
    • Cypress is a system developed by SRI under ARPI for defining taskable, reactive agents. At its core are mature, powerful planning and execution technologies, namely SIPE-2 and PRS-CL.
    Databases: Code for creating or using databases.
    • Database programs.
    • WOOD: Williams Object Oriented Database
    • Persistent Lisp Objects (PLOB!) PLOB is a general purpose, object-oriented database for Allegro and LispWorks Common LISP, available for Windows/NT, Solaris, Linux and Irix. It is distributed in terms of the GPL. older link
    • SAVE-OBJ: Saves ASCII representations of objects to a file.
    • OODB: A semi-productized, "low cost" source code licensing system for distributed Lisp and C++ OODB and RDBMS, developed by TI.
    Syntax
    • CGOL is a C-like or ALGOL-like language that is translated into Lisp before execution.
    • The CMU repository has parsing code.
    • SGML2Lisp is a SGML output formatting tool.
    • The CMU repository has code related to changing or translating to/from Lisp syntax.
    Music
    • Computer Music includes:
      • Common Lisp Music: a sound synthesis and processing system in the Music V family.
      • Common Music Notation: a western music notation package based on Common Lisp, CLOS, and either the Adobe Sonata font or the Finale Petrucci font.
      • Phorx, by James A. Carlson, is a visual environment for creating and playing interactive musical compositions in real-time.
      Standards: Code to bring non-ANSI Lisps into (nearer) conformance, and information about standards.
      • The CMU repository has various macro packages for iteration.
      • Logical Pathnames.
      • Packages.
      • Without-Errors catches all error signals.
      Others
      • SURF-HIPPO Neuron simulation program.
      • SERIES An implementation of the series protocol described in CLTL2
      • Enumeration constants, like C enum.
      • f2cl is a Fortran to Lisp Translator.
      • Codewalking: Lisp code that grovels over arbitrary Lisp code.
      • The CMU repository has some I/O utilities.
      • Library of small extensions.
      • Fun: Some random fun programs written in Lisp, including Life and sunrise/sunset calculations.
      • Collections of Implementation-Dependent Lisp Code.
      • SNMP library for network management.

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      Collections

      • The Carnegie-Mellon AI Repository has a huge volume of code for Lisp and other languages used in Artificial Intelligence. Many of the citations on this page come from there.
      • AI Attic (classic AI programs)
      • The Natural Language Software Registry, Online Research Server.
      • Wheeler Ruml's tools.