Macintosh Common Lisp provides a particularly powerful environment including full implementation of the Common Lisp standard, integrated editor (called FRED), and extensive facilities for graphics and user interface construction. The Macintosh computers are networked, and files can easily be transferred between them and the Unix host machines of MSCC.
Students who have difficulty getting to the Macintoshes in Thompson Hall can supplement their Macintosh work with work on their own PCs, using such packages as XLISP-STAT for Windows and Micro-Emacs. However, due to our limited ability to support alternative facilities, students who wish to work on their own PCs will need to access these resources themselves from archives on the Internet. Also, note that XLISP-STAT is a bare-bones implementation of Common Lisp and does not have the extensive program-development support that MCL has. While we are fortunate to have the powerful MCL system for this course, there is one disadvantage of using it---you must use it in the MSCC lab unless you purchase your own copy of it from Digitool, Inc.. (MCL normally costs about $500 a copy, but there is a special student deal allowing students to purchase it for $135.) It has been pointed out that there is a free version of Allegro Common Lisp for Windows which can be downloaded from franz.com on the Web. This may be an attractive tool for some students.
Here is the file that shows how to display text in an MCL window.