Common Lisp is a general-purpose, multi-paradigm programming language. It supports a combination of procedural, functional, and object-oriented programming paradigms.
via Common Lisp – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Common Lisp is a general-purpose, multi-paradigm programming language. It supports a combination of procedural, functional, and object-oriented programming paradigms. As a dynamic programming language, it facilitates evolutionary and incremental software development, with iterative compilation into efficient run-time programs.
It also supports optional type annotation and casting, which can be added as necessary at the later profiling and optimization stages, to permit the compiler to generate more efficient code. For instance, fixnum can hold an unboxed integer in a range supported by the hardware and implementation, permitting more efficient arithmetic than on big integers or arbitrary precision types.
Common Lisp includes CLOS, an object system that supports multimethods and method combinations. It is extensible through standard features such as Lisp macros (compile-time code rearrangement accomplished by the program itself) and reader macros (extension of syntax to give special meaning to characters reserved for users for this purpose).
Though Common Lisp is not as popular as some non-Lisp languages, many of its features have made their way into other, more widely used programming languages and systems. (See Greenspun’s Tenth Rule.)