# Robot Name Manage robot factory settings. When robots come off the factory floor, they have no name. The first time you boot them up, a random name is generated in the format of two uppercase letters followed by three digits, such as RX837 or BC811. Every once in a while we need to reset a robot to its factory settings, which means that their name gets wiped. The next time you ask, it will respond with a new random name. The names must be random: they should not follow a predictable sequence. Random names means a risk of collisions. Your solution must ensure that every existing robot has a unique name. ## Setup Check out [Exercism Help](http://exercism.io/languages/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 A debugging session with Paul Blackwell at gSchool. [http://gschool.it](http://gschool.it) ## Submitting Incomplete Solutions It's possible to submit an incomplete solution so you can see how others have completed the exercise.