3/31/10 Breaking News- Watch out for my new Super Fantastic Expanded Lisp Comic Book/Text Book from No Starch Press this Summer! Travel to the Land of Lisp- Soon in book form!! It's a bit behind schedule (what's a couple of years between friends) but it will be worth the wait!


Anyone who has ever learned to program in Lisp will tell you it is very different from any other programming language. It is different in lots of surprising ways- This comic book will let you find out how Lisp's unique design makes it so powerful!

This tutorial has small bits of Lisp code written in

this font and color

...Simply copy these snippets into the prompt of a Lisp compiler and by the time the tutorial is done you will have your own text adventure game!

There are many great Lisp compilers out there that you can use, but the easiest to use for this tutorial is Franz's Allegro Common Lisp, a very powerful commercial Lisp that Franz, Inc. has graciously made available through a telnet environment HERE so you can try it out without installing any software on your PC. Simply click on the link and you browser will launch a telnet window that gives you everything you need!




(Another Lisp I really like to use is the open-source CLISP, which you might want to download if you know you'll be spending more time with Lisp)

If you're using Allegro Common Lisp, please execute the following from the Lisp prompt:

(setf tpl:*print-length* nil)

...Just copy the text from your browser, then right-click on the telnet window and choose Paste. Don't worry too much about this line- it just prevents Allegro from chopping off messages printed by our text adventure game.