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 quicklisp.

Prerequisites

All that is needed is an ANSI Common Lisp implementation. Development is done with CCL and SBCL. Other platforms should work, but will not have been tested.

Installation

Automated install

The easiest way to install Lisp-Stat is with Quicklisp:

(ql:quickload :lisp-stat)

Manual install

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 quicklisp. 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/lisp-stat.git

The above assumes you have the default installation directories. Adjust accordingly if you have changed this. If Quicklisp claims it cannot find the systems, try this at the REPL:

(ql:register-local-projects)

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.

Try it out

Load Lisp-Stat:

(ql:quickload :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)
(median car-prices)

Next steps