Pascal Costanza  <pc@p-cos.net> wrote:
+---------------
| doug wrote:
| > I am curious how many of you reference CLHS more than Steele's CLTL2
| > or vise visa in your common lisp programming.  I am just about to give
| > up on CLHS because I found Steele's text was much more accessible.
...
| See http://bc.tech.coop/cltl2-ansi.htm
| 
| I agree that CLtL2 is better for learning, but CLHS works better, and is 
| more accurate, as a reference. CLHS is based on the ANSI Common Lisp 
| specification, and the goal of that specification is to guide 
| implementors of Common Lisp, not necessarily to ease learning.
+---------------

To hammer Pascal's point in a bit further, his phrase "based on" should
be taken as being *much* stronger than in normal everyday usage. While
it is true that the CLHS is not the ANSI Common Lisp standard, the CLHS
*was* mechanically transformed into HTML from the same TeX input source
code that the final published ANSI Common Lisp standard was generated from,
so it's about as close as it's possible to be for something "based on but
not identical". [Even the known typos were left alone!]

Personally, while I do own both CLtL1 & CLtL2, I really learned CL
from a whirlwind tour through Norvig's PAIP and Graham's "ANSI Common
Lisp" & "On Lisp" to get the basics, and then further learning has
been mostly from the CLHS itself (where I *continue* to learn things
on an almost-daily basis) and this newsgroup. [Thanks, guys!]


-Rob

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Rob Warnock			<rpw3@rpw3.org>
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