Common Lisp - not ANSI?

[vityok]

I've been looking for appropriate document to reference ANSI Common Lisp in a paper and discovered that

• It can not be found from the ANSI front page,
• and the document linked from the Wikipedia page does no longer exist.

Does this mean that the Common Lisp is not ANSI any more? I'm just curious...

[JamesF]

I'm pretty sure the standard continues to exist when hyperlinks stop working.

The implementations still use the standard as a reference point; they're ANSI to the extent that they comply with the standard. For practical use (i.e, when writing code) the canonical reference is Lispwork's Hyperspec: http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/common-lisp.html

[findinglisp]

No, it's CL is an ANSI spec. The Hyperspec is the electronic version of the same spec and for all intents and purposes has become THE spec for all Lisp implementations, as JamesF said.

In fact, the story I heard, if you can believe it, was that ANSI lost the electronic version of the actual ANSI spec. Supposedly, if you order the ANSI CL spec you'll end up with a photocopy of whatever master version they have. Suffice it to say that since the volume of CL specs ordered from ANSI is very small, this hasn't caused anybody any problems, particularly since the Hyperspec exists. The Hyperspec is the only electronic version of the CL spec that exists.

If you want something on paper, I recommend Bert Burgemeister's excellent Common Lisp Quick Reference. Very handy, IMO.

[JasonFruit]

That's a helpful little reference. I killed a piece of tree for it. Thanks!