# Grains Calculate the number of grains of wheat on a chessboard given that the number on each square doubles. There once was a wise servant who saved the life of a prince. The king promised to pay whatever the servant could dream up. Knowing that the king loved chess, the servant told the king he would like to have grains of wheat. One grain on the first square of a chess board. Two grains on the next. Four on the third, and so on. There are 64 squares on a chessboard. Write code that shows: - how many grains were on each square, and - the total number of grains ## For bonus points Did you get the tests passing and the code clean? If you want to, these are some additional things you could try: - Optimize for speed. - Optimize for readability. Then please share your thoughts in a comment on the submission. Did this experiment make the code better? Worse? Did you learn anything from it? ## Setup Check out [Exercism Help](http://exercism.io/languages/common-lisp) for instructions to get started writing Common Lisp. That page will explain how to install and setup a Lisp implementation and how to run the tests. ## Formatting While Common Lisp doesn't care about indentation and layout of code, nor whether you use spaces or tabs, this is an important consideration for submissions to exercism.io. Excercism.io's code widget cannot handle mixing of tab and space characters well so using only spaces is recommended to make the code more readable to the human reviewers. Please review your editors settings on how to accomplish this. Below are instructions for popular editors for Common Lisp. ### VIM Use the following commands to ensure VIM uses only spaces for indentation: ```vimscript :set tabstop=2 :set shiftwidth=2 :set expandtab ``` (or as a oneliner `:set tabstop=2 shiftwidth=2 expandtab`). This can be added to your `~/.vimrc` file to use it all the time. ### Emacs Emacs is very well suited for editing Common Lisp and has many powerful add-on packages available. The only thing that one needs to do with a stock emacs to make it work well with exercism.io is to evaluate the following code: `(setq indent-tab-mode nil)` This can be placed in your `~/.emacs` (or `~/.emacs.d/init.el`) in order to have it set whenever Emacs is launched. One suggested add-on for Emacs and Common Lisp is [SLIME](https://github.com/slime/slime) which offers tight integration with the REPL; making iterative coding and testing very easy. ## Source JavaRanch Cattle Drive, exercise 6 [http://www.javaranch.com/grains.jsp](http://www.javaranch.com/grains.jsp) ## Submitting Incomplete Solutions It's possible to submit an incomplete solution so you can see how others have completed the exercise.