Sanity Check

Bad idea?
(defmacro letret (return-binding bindings &body body)
  `(let ,(cons return-binding bindings)
     ,@body
     ,(first return-binding)))

(defmacro letret* (return-binding bindings &body body)
  `(let* ,(cons return-binding bindings)
     ,@body
     ,(first return-binding)))

Okay, that's it. I'm buckling down, /prog/. After being here for over a year, I'm finally going to read SICP and get some Lisp under my belt.

I could probably query /prog/scrape to find out what the most useful utilities are, but that seems to be a pain without an application to produce entire threads from prog.db. This SQLite browser that I have is not very friendly for reading posts. Programming my own post display would be effective, but probably take an hour if I reuse the components from my BBCode editor.

Thus, in the meantime, I request help. I just looked at the CL wiki thing, and god damn, am I confused, there are like 20 dialects and countless development tools for myriads of platforms that look to be in varying states of completion and usefulness.

I already know what I'm going to do with Scheme, there's no Scheme I'd bother with other than The Sussman's Scheme.

But I'd also like to get some actual Lisp under my belt. Some sort of Common Lisp. My development platform is Windows XP, 32-bit. Does anyone have recommendations as far as dialect or tools to use?