...you.
On a UNIX system you can use the function load-data to load the tutorial data. After starting up XLISP-STAT enter the expression (load-data "tutorial"), followed by a return.
...are
The file xlisp.help is optional. It may be replaced by a reduced file xlisp.help.small or it may be omitted entirely. If it is not present interactive help will not be available.
...this
On a Macintosh with limited memory a dialog warning about memory restrictions may be appear at this point. On a Mac II it takes about a minute to load these files; on a Mac Plus or an SE it takes about 3.5 minutes.
...printing.
It is possible to make a finer distinction. The reader takes a string of characters from the listener and converts it into an expression. The evaluator evaluates the expression and the printer converts the result into another string of characters for the listener to print. For simplicity I will use evaluator to describe the combination of these functions.
...form
def acts like a special form, rather than a function, since its first argument is not evaluated (otherwise you would have to quote the symbol). Technically def is a macro, not a special form, but I will not worry about this distinction in this tutorial. def is closely related to the standard Lisp special forms setf and setq. The advantage of using def is that it adds your variable name to a list of def'ed variables that you can retrieve using the function variables. If you use setf or setq there is no easy way to find variables you have defined, as opposed to ones that are predefined. def always affects top level symbol bindings, not local bindings. It can not be used in function definitions to change local bindings.
...electric-heat.
On UNIX systems use the function load-data. For example, evaluating the expression (load-data "car-prices") should load the file car-prices.lsp.
...time.
As an aside, a Lisp symbol can be thought of as a ``thing'' with four cells. These cells contain the symbol's print name, its value, its function definition, and its property list. Lisp symbols are thus much more like physical entities than variable identifiers in FORTRAN or C.
...returned.
The generator used is Marsaglia's portable generator from the Core Math Libraries distributed by the National Bureau of Standards. A state object is a vector containing the state information of the generator. ``Random'' reseeding occurs off the system clock.
...XLISP-STAT
The on line help file may not be available on a single disk version that includes a system file. Alternatively, there may be a small help file available that does not contain documentation for all functions.
...arguments.
This process of applying a function elementwise to its arguments is called mapping.
...expects
The notation used corresponds to the specification of the argument lists in Lisp function definitions. See Section 8 for more information on defining functions.
...keyword
Note that the keyword :title has not been quoted. Keyword symbols, symbols starting with a colon, are somewhat special. When a keyword symbol is created its value is set to itself. Thus a keyword symbol effectively evaluates to itself and does not need to be quoted.
...pi
Actually pi represents a constant, produced with defconst. Its value can't be changed by simple assignment.
...out
To support these features the listener checks the current expression each time you type a return to see if it has a complete expression. If so, the expression is passed to the reader and the evaluator. If not, you can continue typing. There are some heuristics involved here, and an expression with lots of quotes and comments may cause trouble, but it seems to work. Redefining the read table in major ways may not work as you might expect since some knowledge of standard Lisp syntax is built in to the listener.
...type
I have used a quoted list '(purchases precipitation) in this expression to pass the list of symbols to the savevar function. A longer alternative would be the expression (list 'purchases 'precipitation).
...scatterplots
According to Stuetzle [16] the idea to link several plots was first suggested by McDonald [12].
...symbol
The result returned by plot-points is printed something like #<Object: 2010278, prototype = SCATTERPLOT-PROTO>. This is not the value returned by the function, just its printed representation . There are several other data types that are printed this way; file streams, as returned by the open function, are one example. For the most part you can ignore these printed results. There is one unfortunate feature, however: the form #<...> means that there is no printed form of this data type that the Lisp reader can understand. As a result, if you forget to give your plot a name you can't cut and paste the result into a def expression -- you have to redo the plot or use the history mechanism.
...message
To keep things simple I will use the term message to refer to a message corresponding to a message selector.
...expression
dotimes is one of several Lisp looping constructs. It is a special form with the syntax (dotimes (var count) expr ....). The loop is repeated count times, with var bound to 0, 1, ..., count - 1. Other looping constructs are dolist, do and do*.
...like
Recall from Section 6.5 that #<Object: 1966006, prototype = REGRESSION-MODEL-PROTO> is the printed representation of the model object returned by regression-model. Unfortunately you can't cut and paste it into the def, but of course you can cut and paste the regression-model expression or use the history mechanism.
...messages
Ordinarily the entries in the lists returned by these messages correspond simply to the intercept, if one is included in the model, followed by the independent variables as they were supplied to regression-model. However, if degeneracy is detected during computations some variables will not be used in the fit; they will be marked as aliased in the printed summary. The indices of the variables used can be obtained by the :basis message; the entries in the list returned by :coef-estimates correspond to the intercept, if appropriate, followed by the coefficients of the elements in the basis. The messages :x-matrix and :xtxinv are similar in that they use only the variables in the basis.
...as
The / function is used here with three arguments. The first argument is divided by the second, and the result is then divided by the third. Thus the result of the expression (/ 6 3 2) is 1.
...object.
The discussion in this section only scratches the surface of what you can do with functions in the XLISP language. To see more examples you can look at the files that are loaded when XLISP-STAT starts up. For more information on options of function definition, macros, etc. see the XLISP documentation and the books on Lisp mentioned in the references.
...results
mapcar can be given several lists after the function. The function must take as many arguments as there are lists. mapcar will apply the function using the first element of each list, then using the second element, and so on, until one of the lists is exhausted, and return a list of the results.
...reader.
You should quote an array if you type it in using this form, as the value of an array is not defined.
...object:
Recall that the expression #'f1 is short for (function f1) and is used for obtaining the function definition associated with the symbol f1.
...numerically.
The maximizing value for 61#61 is always the sample mean. We could take advantage of this fact and reduce the problem to a one dimensional maximization problem, but it is simpler to just maximize over both parameters.
...T.
The function newtonmax ordinarily uses numerical derivatives in its computations. Occasionally this may not be accurate enough or may take too long. If you have an expression for computing the gradient or the Hessian then you can use these by having your function return a list of the function value and the gradient, or a list of the function value, the gradient and the Hessian matrix, instead of just returning the function value.
...parameters.
The approximation methods assume these functions are twice continuously differentiable; thus they can not be indicator functions.
..."-lcmlib".
There may be slight differences in the implementation of dyn-load on different systems. The help information for this function should give information that is appropriate for your system.

Luke Tierney
Tue Jan 21 15:04:48 CST 1997