• LISP stands for List Processing. Someone calls it "Lots of Idiotic and silly parenthesis."

• LISP was created during 1956-62 by John McCarthy in MIT for nonnumerical computation. Later it is used specifically for the development of artificial intelligence

• There are many different versions of LISP e.g. Common Lisp, Franz LISP...etc. XLISP is one of many dialects, which was developed by David Betz.

• XLISP-STAT was developed by Luke Tierney. This package has many built-in statistical functions.

• XLISP-STAT is cross-platform. However, it is an intepreted rather than a complied language. You must load the program into XLISP-STAT to run it.

Dr. John Behrens is my mentor of statistical computing, especially LISP programming. I use LISP mostly for statistical education i.e. to illustrate statistical concepts by real time simulation. The following are some examples:

• Bandwidth of histogram

• Outliers and central tendencies

• Remove missing observations

• Power simulation

To use any of these programs:

1. Download a free version of XLISP-STAT.

2. Save the file which contains the program source code in text format and replace the extension as lsp. For example, if the filename is "bandwidth.html," rename it as "bandwidth.lsp."

3. Take off all HTML tags such as everything before the tag PRE and the ag itself, as well as the tag /pre at the end.

4. Open Xlisp-stat

5. Load the program from File menu