Anatomy of LISP

  • Authors:

  • John Allen

  • Affiliations:

  • -

  • Venue:
  • Anatomy of LISP
  • Year:
  • 1978

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Abstract

This text is nominally about LISP and data structures. However, in the process it covers much broader areas of computer science. The author has long felt that the beginning student of computer science has been getting' a distorted and disjointed picture of the field. In some ways this confusion is natural; the field has been growing at such a rapid rate that few are prepared to be judged experts in all areas of the discipline. The current alternative seems to be to give a few introductory courses in programming and machine organization followed by relatively specialized courses in more technical areas. The difficulty with this approach is that much of the technical material never gets related. The student's perspective and motivation suffer in the process. This book uses LISP as a means for relating topics which normally get treated in several separate courses. The point is not that we can do this in LISP, but rather that it is natural to do it in LISP. The high-level notation for algorithms is beneficial in explaining and understanding complex algorithms. The use of abstract data structures and abstract LISP programs shows the intent of structured programming and step-wise refinement. Much of the current work in mathematical theories of computation is based on LISP-like languages. Thus LISP is a formalism for describing algorithms, for writing programs, and for proving properties of algorithms. We use data structures as the main thread in our discussions because a proper appreciation of data structures as abstract objects is a necessary prerequisite to an understanding of modern computer science.