Civilized Software is making available a book entitled Interpreting Lisp which presents how LISP works and how to build a LISP interpreter.

This book, Interpreting Lisp, can be downloaded in PDF format via your web-browser, using the http protocol, by clicking lispbook.pdf . When you click the lispbook.pdf link, your browser will download the file lispbook.pdf and place it in some temporary location on your disk and invoke your copy of the Acrobat Reader which will display the first page of lispbook.pdf. You should use the Acrobat Reader program's print button to print the book on your printer. (This button looks like a little printer with a sheet of paper coming out the top.) It is 107 pages in size. You can also save the file being viewed, lispbook.pdf, on your disk by clicking the save button. (This looks like a little floppy disk.)

Alternatively, you can save the file lispbook.pdf directly to disk by right clicking the lispbook.pdf link above and choosing "Save target as" or "Save link as". Then you can deal with the file in any way you choose.

If you do not have the Acrobat Reader program, you can obtain it from http://get.adobe.com/reader/otherversions/ . If this link does not work, it is probably because Adobe updated their website and broke it. So use this link instead: www.adobe.com and navigate to the appropriate download page.

You can also download the C-source file lisp.c via the http protocol by clicking lisp.c and you can obtain the initialization file lispinit via the http protocol by clicking lispinit.txt

Then you must manually change the name of the downloaded file lispinit.txt to just lispinit. This is necessary, since Internet Explorer cannot accept a filename which has no extension for downloading. We thus used the name: lispinit.txt in place of the correct name lispinit, which you must restore.

In some browsers if you left click the links above, the file you downloaded will be displayed in your browser window. If this occurs, you will need to click on the `FILE' item on the top-horizontal-menu and select `save as' and specify the appropriate file name and location yourself. You can also get around this by right clicking a link and choosing "Save Target As" or "Save link as".

The files lisp.c and lispinit are ordinary ASCII text files with lines terminated by linefeed (LF) characters (10). When one of these files is downloaded to a Windows machine, the LF characters should be replaced by carriage-return, linefeed (CR-LF) (13-10) pairs by the browser as Windows demands. If necessary, you may need to use a text editor to insert the CR's yourself. If you use a Macintosh or Unix/Linux machine, you should not have any CR's present, however you can use emacs or some other editor to strip CRs if necessary.

Please let me know what you think of this book, including any errors you find, by emailing garyknott@gmail.com . Also, I would appreciate you placing links to this Lisp book found here at www.civilized.com in appropriate places, or recommending that others place such links, so that more people can find this little book.

Thank you.