Land of Lisp

Basic Lisp Etiquette

The way commands are called and the way code is formatted in Lisp is somewhat strange compared with other languages. First of all, you need to surround the command (and its arguments) with parentheses, as with the defparameter function:

> (defparameter *small* 1)
*SMALL*

Without the parentheses, a command will not be called.

Also, spaces and line breaks are completely ignored when Lisp reads in your code. That means you could call this command in any crazy way, with the same result:

> (               defparameter
           *small* 1)
*SMALL*

Because Lisp code can be formatted in such flexible ways, Lispers have a lot of conventions for formatting commands, including when to use multiple lines and indentation. We’ll loosely follow some of the common indentation ...