By Robert MacLachlan, Skef Wholey, Bill Chiles, and William Lott
CMU Common Lisp attempts to make the full power of the underlying environment available to the Lisp programmer. This is done using combination of hand-coded interfaces and foreign function calls to C libraries. Although the techniques differ, the style of interface is similar. This chapter provides an overview of the facilities available and general rules for using them, as well as describing specific features in detail. It is assumed that the reader has a working familiarity with Mach, Unix and X, as well as access to the standard system documentation.