Installing Lisp on my MacBook Pro

These instructions are based on this blog post over here. Those instructions are from 2005, there was a little bit of extra work to get it working on my MacBook Pro.

OpenMCL

You need to download the latest version of OpenMCL. For Mac OS X on Intel, Version 1.0 will NOT work, so you need to grab the latest snapshot. Make sure you grab the correct version for your architecture. For my MacBook Pro, I downloaded the version labeled darwinx8664.

Untar and copy it over to somewhere reasonable. I copied it to /Applications/OpenMCL.

In /Applications/OpenMCL/scripts, there are a couple variables that need to be defined in BOTH the openmcl and openmcl64 files.


CCL_DEFAULT_DIRECTORY=/Applications/OpenMCL
OPENMCL_KERNEL=dx86cl64


I then used symbolic link to put this script into my search path.


sudo ln /Applications/OpenMCL/scripts/openmcl64 /usr/bin/openmcl


Emacs

I use Aquamacs as my text editor. It is easily the best Emacs I’ve ever used. Downloading and installing should be straight forward.

SLIME

SLIME is highly recommended when working with Lisp and Emacs. It can be downloaded from here. I usually stick my Emacs modules in ~/.emacs.d directory. To setup your .emacs file:


(setq inferior-lisp-program "/Applications/OpenMCL/scripts/openmcl")
(add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/slime")
(require 'slime)
(slime-setup)

And there you go. You should be ready to go.