# Nucleotide Count Given a DNA string, compute how many times each nucleotide occurs in the string. DNA is represented by an alphabet of the following symbols: 'A', 'C', 'G', and 'T'. Each symbol represents a nucleotide, which is a fancy name for the particular molecules that happen to make up a large part of DNA. Shortest intro to biochemistry EVAR: - twigs are to birds nests as - nucleotides are to DNA and RNA as - amino acids are to proteins as - sugar is to starch as - oh crap lipids I'm not going to talk about lipids because they're crazy complex. So back to nucleotides. DNA contains four types of them: adenine (`A`), cytosine (`C`), guanine (`G`), and thymine (`T`). RNA contains a slightly different set of nucleotides, but we don't care about that for now. ## 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 The Calculating DNA Nucleotides_problem at Rosalind [http://rosalind.info/problems/dna/](http://rosalind.info/problems/dna/) ## Submitting Incomplete Solutions It's possible to submit an incomplete solution so you can see how others have completed the exercise.