I have been trying to find an environment that does not involve installing anything else on my mac for Lisp, as I will not be using it after I get the homework done (who know if I continue using it). I have tried to look but I can't find anything. Anybody know if it does have it, and how to use it within Emacs?
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You *can* just trash it afterwards, you know - it's not like a lisp would infect your mac and chew up the disk. None of the Mac Lisps that I know of require any kind of installation beyond "copy the app to wherever". – molbdnilo Mar 08 '12 at 19:09
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You have a few options for one-click Lisp environments.
If you prefer an Emacs-based environment, check out LispBox. This actually installs a separate instance of Emacs, afaik, so you probably won't have your existing Emacs settings with it.
If you want to use your existing Emacs, SLIME is available both through quicklisp (which you really should be using) or through ELPA.
If you're ok with not having an Emacs environment, and you're not going to be using the language for long, look into LispWorks personal, which has a one-click environment installer in OS X.
If you were actually asking about Scheme (or could go for either Scheme or Common Lisp), take a look at Racket (not technically a Scheme, it actually has a lot of additional features, but they do support R5RS and have a fairly short list of unsupported R6RS features).
Inaimathi
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Lispworks personal, is that common lisp? Edit: actually I got it. Thanks a lot for the links! – Andy Mar 07 '12 at 21:17
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Emacs Lisp is rather different from regular Lisp, so it's probably not directly useful for classes or self-study if your target is something like Scheme or Common Lisp. But yes, Emacs has its own Lisp interpreter (or rather, is its own Lisp interpreter). You might want to read up on the differences between Emacs elisp and other dialects / variants to determine whether it might suit your needs.
tripleee
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If you `(require 'cl)`you will pull in some convenience macros for looping and flow control, simple string manipulation, etc which allow you to use a limited set of Common Lisp contructs, but it's hardly the full CLOS. You might be able to complete the first exercises with that, though. Serious Lisp users run a "real" Lisp interpreter as a subprocess; look for "inferior Lisp" in the manual, or in Google. – tripleee Mar 07 '12 at 21:36
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And you won't have lexical scoping, which will bite you in big and unexpected ways. – JasonFruit Mar 12 '12 at 12:10
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Clozure CL is a available for free from the Mac App Store http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/clozure-cl/id489900618?ls=1&mt=12
sigjuice
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