Installation

New to Lisp

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

If you are an existing emacs user, you can configure emacs for Common Lisp.

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

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, CCL and SBCL. Other platforms should work, but will not have been tested.

Installation

ASDF

If you want to modify Lisp-Stat you’ll need to retrieve the files from github and place them in a directory that is known to ASDF. This long shell command will checkout all the required systems:

cd ~/quicklisp/local-projects && \
git clone https://github.com/Lisp-Stat/data-frame.git && \
git clone https://github.com/Lisp-Stat/dfio.git && \
git clone https://github.com/Lisp-Stat/special-functions.git && \
git clone https://github.com/Lisp-Stat/numerical-utilities.git && \
git clone https://github.com/Lisp-Stat/documentation.git && \
git clone https://github.com/Lisp-Stat/plot.git && \
git clone https://github.com/Lisp-Stat/select.git && \
git clone https://github.com/Lisp-Stat/cephes.cl.git && \
git clone https://github.com/Symbolics/alexandria-plus && \
git clone https://github.com/Lisp-Stat/lisp-stat.git

The above assumes you have the default installation directories. Adjust accordingly if you have changed this. If this is the first time running Lisp-Stat, use Quicklisp to get the dependencies:

(ql:quickload :lisp-stat)

From now on you can load it with:

(asdf:load-system :lisp-stat)

If ASDF claims it can’t find the required systems (this might happen the first time around), reset the system configuration with:

(asfd:clear-source-registry)

and try again.

Quicklisp

If you have quicklisp installed, you can use:

(ql:quickload :lisp-stat)

If Quicklisp claims it cannot find the systems, try this at the REPL:

(ql:register-local-projects)

Quicklisp is good at managing the project depencency 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.

Documentation

Lisp-Stat reference manuals are generated with the declt system. This produces high quality PDFs, markdown, HTML and Info output. The API reference manuals are available in HTML in the reference section of this website; PDF and Info files that can be download from the individual systems docs/ directory.

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 into a Lisp-Stat node at the top level of the info tree.

Initialization file

You can put customisations to your environment in either your implementation’s init file, or in a separate 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.

(require 'dexador)
;;; Load default data sets
(defparameter *default-datasets*
  '(rdata:iris rdata:toothgrowth rdata:plantgrowth rdata:usarrests)
  "Data sets loaded as part of personal Lisp-Stat initialisation. Available in every session.")

(progn				  ;do all initialisation here
  (map nil #'(lambda (x)
	       (format t "Loading ~A" (make-symbol (symbol-name x)))
	       (eval `(defdf ,(intern (symbol-name x))
			  (read-csv ,(symbol-value 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:

(load #P"LS:DATASETS;CAR-PRICES")

Find the sample mean and median:

(mean car-prices)   ; => 2.810199998617172d0
(median car-prices) ; => 2.55

Next steps