# Hello World The classical introductory exercise. Just say "Hello, World!". ["Hello, World!"](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22Hello,_world!%22_program) is the traditional first program for beginning programming in a new language or environment. The objectives are simple: - Write a function that returns the string "Hello, World!". - Run the test suite and make sure that it succeeds. - Submit your solution and check it at the website. If everything goes well, you will be ready to fetch your first real exercise. ## Setup Check out [Exercism Help](http://exercism.io/languages/common-lisp) for instructions to get started writing Common Lisp. That page will explain how to install and setup a Lisp implementation and how to run the tests. ## Formatting While Common Lisp doesn't care about indentation and layout of code, nor whether you use spaces or tabs, this is an important consideration for submissions to exercism.io. Excercism.io's code widget cannot handle mixing of tab and space characters well so using only spaces is recommended to make the code more readable to the human reviewers. Please review your editors settings on how to accomplish this. Below are instructions for popular editors for Common Lisp. ### VIM Use the following commands to ensure VIM uses only spaces for indentation: ```vimscript :set tabstop=2 :set shiftwidth=2 :set expandtab ``` (or as a oneliner `:set tabstop=2 shiftwidth=2 expandtab`). This can be added to your `~/.vimrc` file to use it all the time. ### Emacs Emacs is very well suited for editing Common Lisp and has many powerful add-on packages available. The only thing that one needs to do with a stock emacs to make it work well with exercism.io is to evaluate the following code: `(setq indent-tab-mode nil)` This can be placed in your `~/.emacs` (or `~/.emacs.d/init.el`) in order to have it set whenever Emacs is launched. One suggested add-on for Emacs and Common Lisp is [SLIME](https://github.com/slime/slime) which offers tight integration with the REPL; making iterative coding and testing very easy. ## Source This is an exercise to introduce users to using Exercism [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22Hello,_world!%22_program](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22Hello,_world!%22_program) ## Submitting Incomplete Solutions It's possible to submit an incomplete solution so you can see how others have completed the exercise.