Common Lisp has a reputation to be an extremely well designed, stable, industrial strength, standardized language, with quality implementations suitable for anything from hobby projects to space travel.
Common Lisp is standardized by ANSI as ANSI INCITS 226-1994 (R2004), formerly known as X3.226-1994 (R1999), and sometimes refered to as X3J13, the name of the ANSI standardization committee. A hypertext version of the Common Lisp standard was made available by Kent Pitman as the CLHS.
Common Lisp Features
- interactivity (dynamic redefinitions)
- first-class symbols
- arbitrary-precision integers
- exact rational arithmetic
- well-integrated complex numbers
- generalized references
- multiple values
- first-class functions
- anonymous functions
- macros
- multiple inheritance
- multiple dispatch
- generic functions
- method combination
- (first-class) classes and meta classes
- (first-class) packages
- built-in programmable parser (read)
- built-in programmable unparser
- reader macros
- compiler macros
- optional argument
- keyword arguments
- meta-object protocol
- special (dynamically scoped) variables
- named blocks, nonlocal goto (catch/throw)
- conditions, restarts
- the loop macro
- the format function
- type declarations
- compiler available at run-time
- extensive list processing features.
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