Posts tagged lisp

The empty list

:: lisp

My friend Zyni pointed out that someone has been getting really impressively confused and cross on reddit about empty lists, booleans and so on in Common Lisp, which led us to a discussion about what the differences between CL and Scheme really are here. Here’s a summary which we think is correct.

Two simple pattern matchers for Common Lisp

:: programming, lisp

I’ve written two pattern matchers for Common Lisp:

  • destructuring-match, or dsm, is a case-style construct which can match destructuring-bind-style lambda lists with a couple of extensions;
  • spam, the simple pattern matcher, does not bind variables but lets you match based on assertions about, for instance, the contents of lists.

Both dsm and spam strive to be simple and correct.