List Processing LISP

Since LISP has been available in different variants, American National Standards Institute (ANSI) standardized a dialect of the LISP programming language in 1994 called Common Lisp (CL) [2]. Common Lisp is a language specification rather than an implementation. An example follows  

The code defines a function (square) that returns the square of a variable (x), assigns (let) values to the variables x and y, and performs a calculation using the square of x and adding it to y. The results in this case would be 16. 

As the name list processing suggests, the strength of this language lies in the definition, manipulation, and evaluation of lists that are defined in a simple statement ( benzene aromatic cyclohexane cycloaliphatic ) 

This is a property list, where keywords (those preceded by a colon) have values assigned that can be retrieved by using a retrieval function (getf)  

Few chemistry specific dialects have been developed, one of which is the Chem-Lisp language interpreter in Apex-3D, an expert system for investigating structure-activity relationships. ChemLisp represents a special dialect of the LISP language. ChemLisp accesses main data structures and modules containing basic algorithmic functions. 

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List Processing (LISP) is a programming language that uses an interpreter for symbolic calculations based on single-scalar values (atoms) and associative arrays (lists). 

DENDRAL is written in list processing (LISP) and consists of a series of programs that shall be described here. 

Frame System Uses frames for the representation of chemical information that are implemented using a built-in ChemLisp language interpreter. Chem-Lisp represents a special dialect of the list processing (LISP) language. 

Figure 8.4 Program to find an element in a list of elements by means of list processing language (LISP) and a recursive programming in logic (PROLOG) procedure.

When the interpreter computes (or evaluates, in Lisp jargon) a list, it always assumes that the first element of the list is the name of a function and the rest of the elements are the arguments that the function needs for processing. In the above example, the interpreter performs the addition of two numbers the name of the function is the symbol + and the two arguments are the numbers 330 and 336. 

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