[CM] clm and snd questions

[James Baker]

When I first discovered the world of lisp I found some of this a
little confusing at first so I'll try to help you on some of these...

Firstly, lets make a distinction.  Lisp is the name of a family of
languages, "common lisp" + "scheme" are two (quite different) members
of the lisp family.

> I'm trying to learn Common Lisp Music.
> CLM is not a language itself but a package / library that in order to
> compile and run needs a Lisp/Common Lisp environment (maybe only Common
> Lisp?). Is that correct?

Sort of. CLM comes in two "flavours",
1 - the original CLM, which does indeed require a common lisp
2 - snd, the swiss army knife of sound editors - can be scripted via
scheme, ruby and forth

> I've found in the web that a good starting point for learning common lisp is
> SBCL, so I've installed it. If I'm not mistaken it works only through
> command line so it does not have its own environment. Is there any
> environment for SBCL and is it a good choice for common lisp and especially
> clm?
>

SBCL is indeed a good common lisp to start with IMHO as it is
reasonably friendly and i find its error messages more helpful than
some other cl interpreters.

Most folks who use common lisp tend to be emacs users, there is an
excellent extension for emacs called slime.  Slime can be fairly
daunting for a new user, but the emacs/slime combo makes for an
excellent development environment.

> And as for snd, I had a problem running it. Although I've installed it
> successfully, there comes an error message when I try to run it "Failure in
> executing secondary process (procedure) 'snd' - No such file or folder"
> (translating from Greek so sorry for any inaccuracy). Does anybody know what
> may be wrong?
>

I'll leave this one for Bill to answer :)

> Sorry for all of these questions and my ignorance, although I do have
> experience in other programming languages I have no idea about lisp and
> searching in the web with all these thousands of informations, although
> helpful, is confusing for a newbie. So I'll be glad if anybody answers even
> to some of my questions.
>

everyone has to start somewhere,

James