I’ve only used Common Lisp. I find them quite handy as a light-weight abstraction to represent data for a simple script or a small program. Though, to my mind, they can get pretty unwieldy as the domain gets even a bit complex.

Emacs Lisp uses them quite a bit. The elisp manual has a section on using them and lists the standard ones.

Heh, didn’t realize you were the same poster that posted the Special Forms thread.

The book I mentioned in the Special Forms thread makes a lot of use of property lists. Examples include probabilities in an inference network, location of features inside rooms in a program for a household robot, inheritance relationships (as in OO methodology), and various others.

One of the main differences I see in this book (as well as most old Lisp code I find) is that it’s programmed very differently that modern Lisp programs. There’s much more reliance on symbolic manipulation, which is probably why the ability to assign properties to symbols originally arose. A symbol might represent a particular thing or concept instead of just being a variable name. It’s a very different way of thinking about programming.

I really need to pick this book back up. I started working through it on a business trip a few years ago and then lost it in the move, then found it again just the other day.