The symbolic programming environment (SPE™)

The constructs provided in the Common Lisp Language provide a very powerful and flexible representation mechanism. The language alone, however, does not create an efficient work environment. Without tools that explicitly attack the problems of program organization, editing, and debugging, it remains a difficult task to exploit these advantages fully. What is needed is a collection of tools which, with knowledge about the relationship of the components in Lisp and a model of how Lisp programs are developed, encapsulates the tasks that constitute the Lisp programming process. Building such a programming environment in Lisp is a more tractable problem than in most conventional languages (such as C, FORTRAN, and Pascal) because the flexibility of Lisp allows programs to be operated on as data by other Lisp programs. This gives rise to the potential for a much tighter integration of tools than has typically been available.