"LISP" is a family of languages. There are three main existing LISP dialects: Common Lisp, Scheme, and Emacs Lisp.
I use Common Lisp the most. If you want to learn Oommon Lisp I'd recommend installing the sbcl package, which is a Common Lisp compiler, and getting SLIME, a Lisp IDE for Emacs (http://common-lisp.net/project/slime/) from CVS (it isn't packaged for Debian yet since it hasn't had a real release yet). There are
also numerous Common Lisp libaries in Debian that you can find with apt-cache search.
Is Scheme a proper subset of Common Lisp? What do you make of the available Free software runtimes, compilers, and libraries for each: is Scheme primarily an "academic" language, whereas Common Lisp is where you need to go to find mature library support for database interaction, sockets, and X11 toolkits?
I'd really appreciate any comments you have about that. I've been forcing myself to use and learn Emacs here even though I'm quite handy in vi/vim. Without learning Emacs Lisp, I'm really no better off with it than I was with vi: set a few trivial configuration options and master keyboard shortcuts to take advantage of built-in functionality.
Thanks,
dircha
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