Installation

New to Lisp

If you are a Lisp newbie and want to get started as fast as possible, then Portacle is your best option. Portacle is a multi-platform IDE for Common Lisp that includes Emacs, SBCL, Git, Quicklisp, all configured and ready to use.

Users new to lisp should also consider going through the Lisp-Stat basic tutorial, which guides you step-by-step through the basics of working with Lisp as a statistics practitioner.

If you currently use emacs for other languages, you can configure emacs for Common Lisp.

Experienced with Lisp

We assume an experienced user will have their own Emacs and lisp implementation and will want to install according to their own tastes and setup. The repo links you need are below, or you can install with clpm or quicklisp.

Prerequisites

All that is needed is an ANSI Common Lisp implementation. Development is done with Genera and SBCL. Other platforms should work, but will not have been tested, nor can we offer support (maintaining & testing on multiple implementations requires more resources than the project has available). Note that CCL is not in good health, and there are a few numerical bugs that remain unfixed. A shame, as we really liked CCL.

Installation

The easiest way to install Lisp-Stat is via Quicklisp, a library manager for Common Lisp. It works with your existing Common Lisp implementation to download, install, and load any of over 1,500 libraries with a few simple commands.

Quicklisp is like a package manager in Linux. It can load packages from the local file system, or download them if required. If you have quicklisp installed, you can use:

(ql:quickload :lisp-stat)

Quicklisp is good at managing the project dependency retrieval, but most of the time we use ASDF because of its REPL integration. You only have to use Quicklisp once to get the dependencies, then use ASDF for day-to-day work.

You can install additional Lisp-Stat modules in the same way. For example to install the SQLDF module:

(ql:quickload :sqldf)

Loading

Once you have obtained Lisp-Stat via Quicklisp, you can load in one of two ways:

• ASDF
• Quicklisp

Loading with ASDF

(asdf:load-system :lisp-stat)

If you are using emacs, you can use the slime shortcuts to load systems by typing , and then load-system in the mini-buffer. This is what the Lisp-Stat developers use most often, the shortcuts are a helpful part of the workflow.

Loading with Quicklisp

To load with Quicklisp:

(ql:quickload :lisp-stat)

Quicklisp uses the same ASDF command as above to load Lisp-Stat.

Updating Lisp-Stat

When a new release is announced, you can update via Quicklisp like so:

(ql:update-dist "lisp-stat")

IDEs

There are a couple of IDE’s to consider:

Emacs

Emacs, with the slime package is the most tested IDE and the one the authors use. If you are using one of the starter lisp packages mentioned in the getting started section, this will have been installed for you. Otherwise, slime/swank is available in quicklisp and clpm.

Jupyter Lab

Jupyter Lab and common-lisp-jupyter provide an environment similar to RStudio for working with data and performing analysis. The Lisp-Stat analytics examples use Jupyter Lab to illustrate worked examples based on the book, Introduction to the Practice of Statistics.

Visual Studio Code

This is a very popular IDE, with improving support for Common Lisp. If you already use this editor, it is worth investigating to see if the Lisp support is sufficient for you to perform an analysis.

Documentation

You can install the info manuals into the emacs help system and this allows searching and browsing from within the editing environment. To do this, use the install-info command. As an example, on my MS Windows 10 machine, with MSYS2/emacs installation:

install-info --add-once select.info /c/msys64/mingw64/share/info/dir

installs the select manual at the top level of the info tree. You can also install the common lisp hyperspec and browse documentation for the base Common Lisp system. This really is the best way to use documentation whilst programming Common Lisp and Lisp-Stat. See the emacs external documentation and “How do I install a piece of Texinfo documentation?” for more information on installing help files in emacs.

See getting help for information on how to access Info documentation as you code. This is the mechanism used by Lisp-Stat developers because you don’t have to leave the emacs editor to look up function documentation in a browser.

Initialization file

You can put customisations to your environment in either your implementation’s init file, or in a personal init file and load it from the implementation’s init file. For example, I keep my customisations in #P"~/ls-init.lisp" and load it from SBCL’s init file ~/.sbclrc in a Lisp-Stat initialisation section like this:

;;; Lisp-Stat
(asdf:load-system :lisp-stat)
(load #P"~/ls-init.lisp")

Settings in your personal lisp-stat init file override the system defaults.

Here’s an example ls-init.lisp file that loads some common R data sets:

(defparameter *default-datasets*
  '("tooth-growth" "plant-growth" "usarrests" "iris" "mtcars")
  "Data sets loaded as part of personal Lisp-Stat initialisation.
  Available in every session.")

(map nil #'(lambda (x)
	     (format t "Loading ~A~%" x)
	     (data x))
	     *default-datasets*)

With this init file, you can immediately access the data sets in the *default-datasets* list defined above, e.g.:

(head iris)
;;   X2 SEPAL-LENGTH SEPAL-WIDTH PETAL-LENGTH PETAL-WIDTH SPECIES
;; 0  1          5.1         3.5          1.4         0.2 setosa
;; 1  2          4.9         3.0          1.4         0.2 setosa
;; 2  3          4.7         3.2          1.3         0.2 setosa
;; 3  4          4.6         3.1          1.5         0.2 setosa
;; 4  5          5.0         3.6          1.4         0.2 setosa
;; 5  6          5.4         3.9          1.7         0.4 setosa

Try it out

Load Lisp-Stat:

(asdf:load-system :lisp-stat)

Change to the Lisp-Stat user package:

(in-package :ls-user)

Load some data:

(data :sg-weather)

Find the sample mean and median:

(mean sg-weather:precipitation) ;=> .0714
(median sg-weather:max-temps)   ;=> 31.55

Next steps