Common Lisp, commonly abbreviated CL, is a dialect of the Lisp programming language, published in ANSI standard document Information Technology - Programming Language - Common Lisp, formerly X3.226-1994 (R1999). Developed to standardize the divergent variants of Lisp which predated it, it is not an implementation but rather a language specification. Several implementations of the Common Lisp standard are available, including commercial products and open source software. Common Lisp is a multiparadigm, general-purpose programming language that: