= Installing a Lisp Environment for Babel2 =

Babel2 is written in Common Lisp because we strongly believe that Lisp is the best programming language for doing what we do. What’s not so great about using Lisp is that setting up a proper Lisp environment can be difficult sometimes. But don’t surrender, it can be done and I hope this page will help you to succeed. If you get stuck or find problems with this instruction, don’t hesitate to contact us: pieter@arti.vub.ac.be.

For running Babel2 you need three things: A Lisp environment, [http://www.gnuplot.info/ Gnuplot] for creating graphs and [http://www.graphviz.org/ Graphviz] for network visualizations.

Babel2 runs on a number of Lisps, including [http://trac.clozure.com/openmcl Clozure Common Lisp (CCL)] (version 1.5 is recommended), [http://sbcl.sourceforge.net/ SBCL], [http://www.lispworks.com/ Lispworks], and probably others. If you have one of these Lisps installed, then most of the work is already done and you only need to install the other two tools. Note that Babel2 will not work if your Lisp doesn’t support threads.

If you don’t have a Lisp on your machine, then I recommend you to install [http://trac.clozure.com/openmcl CCL] as a Lisp implementation, [http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/ Emacs] as an editor and development environment (don’t frown, it’s still better than vi) and [http://common-lisp.net/project/slime/ Slime] for the communication between the lisp and emacs. Computer experts feel free to install any of the above Lisps (plus gnuplot and graphviz, please note that Babel2 will not run in the free Lispworks Personal Edition because it has a heap size limit) and all others follow the instructions for their operating system below:

- [wiki:Babel2InstallMac Mac]
- [wiki:Babel2InstallWindows Windows]
- [wiki:Babel2InstallLinux Linux]
- [wiki:Babel2InstallFail when everything failed]

Good luck!