What are the major differences between Emacs Lisp and Common Lisp? [closed]

Question

I want to learn the lisp language, since my editor is emacs, I prefer emacs lisp.

Can anyone give me some suggestions to learn lisp, emacs lisp, or common lisp?

What are the major differences between those two?

Answer 1

There's quite a bit of crossover, especially at the beginner level, so whichever you start with will mostly transfer to the other.

Some of the major differences:

• elisp has traditionally used dynamic scoping rules; Common Lisp uses lexical scoping rules. With dynamic scoping, a function can access local variables declared in calling functions and has generally fallen out of favor. Emacs has a lexical-let form that simulates lexical scoping and recent versions of emacs allow optional lexical scoping on a function-by-function basis.

• elisp doesn't have closures, which makes composing functions and currying difficult. There's a apply-partially function that works similarly to currying. Note that the lexical-let form introduced in Emacs 24 makes it possible to produce closures via lexical scoping.

• Much of the Common Lisp library that has been built up over time isn't available in elisp. A subset is provided by the elisp cl package

• elisp doesn't do tail-call optimization.

Answer 2

These Emacs-Wiki pages offer some info about the relation between the two Lisps and their differences:

• http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CommonLisp
• http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsLisp
• http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsLispLimitations