[Languages] You Are Not Lispless!

While we are Lisping, lispen close.  You, too, can speak (code) with a Lisp!  If you have Visual Studio.NET, or the .NET Framework SDK, but have not yet fully indulged your curiosity, you may not know that you already have a Lisp compiler that compiles to MSIL.  Check out the CLisp Sample project in your “Tool Developers Guide” directory.  You will find it located at your equivalent of

     C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003\SDK\v1.1\Tool Developers Guide\Samples\clisp

Note that this sample is in the .NET Framework SDK, so you have it even if you do not have Visual Studio.NET and you even have it if you are using 1.0 rather than 1.1.  As far as I remember, it was even there in the beta releases of the .NET SDK.  No excuses accepted!

This CLisp sample does not implement all Lisp functions but the documentation states that “others can be added with ease, as they are implemented as a runtime library.“  That means you can have all the list processing fun you want!

There are some other pretty impressive goodies in the “Tool Developers Guide” subdirectory, so do investigate.  In particular, the “docs” subfolder should not be missed:

     C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003\SDK\v1.1\Tool Developers Guide\docs

KEY TAKE-AWAY:  “There's more to the .NET Framework SDK and Visual Studio.NET release package than meets the eye.  Get curious and look around!”