Article · Wikipedia archive · Last revised Jul 1, 2026

XLispStat

XLispStat is a statistical scientific package based on the XLISP language.

Last revised
Jul 1, 2026
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≈ 2 min
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Wikipedia ↗
XLispStat
DeveloperLuke Tierney
Stable release
3.52.23 / March 2, 2013 (2013-03-02)
Written inC, Lisp
Operating systemUNIX/X11, Win16, Win32, MS-DOS,1 Classic MacOS, AmigaOS2
LicenseBSD-like open source license
Websitehomepage.divms.uiowa.edu/~luke/xls/xlsinfo/

XLispStat is a statistical scientific package based on the XLISP language.

Many free statistical software like ARC (nonlinear curve fitting problems) and ViSta are based on this package.

It includes a variety of statistical functions and methods, including routines for nonlinear curve fit. Many add-on packages have been developed to extend XLispStat, including contingency tables3 and regression analysis4

XLispStat has seen usage in many fields, including astronomy,5 GIS,6 speech acoustics,7 econometrics,8 and epidemiology.9

XLispStat was historically influential in the field of statistical visualization.10

Its author, Luke Tierney, wrote a 1990 book on it.11

XLispStat dates to the late 1980s/early 1990s and probably saw its greatest popularity in the early-to-mid 1990s with greatly declining usage since. In the 1990s it was in very widespread use in statistical education, but has since been mostly replaced by R. There is a paper explaining why UCLA's Department of Statistics abandoned it in 1998,12 and their reasons for doing so likely hold true for many other of its former users.

Source code to XLispStat is available under a permissive license (similar terms to BSD)13

See also

See also

References

References

  1. "XLS is a preliminary minimal version of XLISP-STAT for MSDOS". Retrieved 2023-09-07.
  2. "Index of /~luke/XLS/Xlispstat/Old/Amiga".
  3. Badsberg, J. H. (1992). "Model Search in Contingency Tables by CoCo". Computational Statistics: Volume 1: Proceedings of the 10th Symposium on Computational Statistics. pp. 251–256. doi:10.1007/978-3-662-26811-7_33.
  4. R. Dennis Cook; Sanford Weisberg (25 September 2009) [1994]. An Introduction to Regression Graphics. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-0-470-31770-9.
  5. G. Jogesh Babu; Eric D. Feigelson (6 December 2012). Statistical Challenges in Modern Astronomy II. Springer Science & Business Media. p. 193. ISBN 978-1-4612-1968-2.
  6. Michael Worboys (21 April 1994). Innovations In GIS. CRC Press. p. 186. ISBN 978-0-7484-0141-3.
  7. J. Harrington; S. Cassidy (6 December 2012). Techniques in Speech Acoustics. Springer Science & Business Media. p. x. ISBN 978-94-011-4657-9.
  8. John E. Floyd (4 December 2009). Interest Rates, Exchange Rates and World Monetary Policy. Springer Science & Business Media. p. 5. ISBN 978-3-642-10280-6.
  9. Mitchell H. Gail (2 November 2000). Encyclopedia of Epidemiologic Methods. John Wiley & Sons. p. 855. ISBN 978-0-471-86641-1.
  10. Forrest W. Young; Pedro M. Valero-Mora; Michael Friendly (15 September 2011). Visual Statistics: Seeing Data with Dynamic Interactive Graphics. John Wiley & Sons. p. 25. ISBN 978-1-118-16541-6. XLisp-Stat... has had considerable impact on the development of statistical visualization systems.
  11. Luke Tierney (25 September 2009) [1990]. LISP-STAT: An Object-Oriented Environment for Statistical Computing and Dynamic Graphics. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-0-470-31756-3.
  12. de Leeuw, Jan (February 2005). "On Abandoning XLISP-STAT" (PDF). Journal of Statistical Software. 13 (7). ISSN 1548-7660. Retrieved 2017-05-30.
  13. File "COPYING" in archive at ftp://ftp.stat.umn.edu/pub/xlispstat/current/xlispstat-3-52-20.tar.gz
External links