# The Keithlisp Programmer's Reference
Keithlisp is a tiny, stripped-down version of Lisp written in C. It's
vaguely reminiscent of Common Lisp; however, **Keithlisp does NOT fully
adhere to the Common Lisp standard!** Many Common Lisp functions are not
present or behave differently in Keithlisp.

## General Advice
- Keithlisp assumes that you, the programmer, know what you are doing.
  **Many Keithlisp functions will segfault or otherwise misbehave if you
  do not provide them with the data they expect.**
- Keithlisp doesn't properly parse tokens longer than 64 bytes. This
  includes string literals.
- Strings in Keithlisp are sequences of *bytes*. A zero byte does not
  necessarily correspond to the end of a string.
- You can comment out `#define LISP_USE_ATOMS_ALIST` in main.h to remove
  the atoms_alist. This significantly reduces Keithlisp's memory
  footprint, but makes it impossible to retrieve the name of an atom.
- Keithlisp doesn't automatically garbage-collect return values at the
  moment, but this may change in the future. If you know whether a
  function will return a cons/string referenced elsewhere or not, you
  should insert a garbage collector annotation in your code.

## Contents
- [The Keithlisp Standard Library](stdlib.md)