Common Lisp 3 Evaluation and Compilation 3.1 Evaluation Execution of code can be accomplished by a variety of means ranging from direct interpretation of a form representing a program to invocation of compiled code produced by a compiler .
Evaluation is the process by which a program is executed in Common Lisp .
Any of these facilities might share the same execution strategy, or each might use a different one. Evaluation can be understood in terms of a model in which an interpreter recursively traverses a form performing each step of the computation as it goes. The Evaluation Model .