The Language of Artificial Intelligence--LISP
- 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:
To use any of these programs:
- Download a free version of XLISP-STAT.
- 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."
- 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.
- Open Xlisp-stat
- Load the program from File menu