Posts tagged lisp

Common Lisp’s pathname system has many problems. Here is proposal to make the situation a little better in one respect. This is not a general fix: it’s just trying to solve one problem.

Most uses of shadow and shadowing-import in Common Lisp packages point to design problems.

Or, why limitations matter.

Štar is a concise and extensible iteration construct for Common Lisp which aims to be pleasant to use, easy to understand, fast if needed, general, and not to look like Fortran.

Symbol nicknames allows multiple names to refer to the same symbol in supported implementations of Common Lisp. That may or may not be useful.

Yesterday I wrote an article describing one of the ways traditional Lisp macros can be unhygienic even when they appear to be hygienic. Here’s a horrible solution to that.

It’s tempting to think that by being sufficiently careful about names bound by traditional Lisp macros you can write macros which are hygienic. This is not true: it’s much harder than that.

An article constructed from several emails from my friend Zyni, reproduced with her permission. Note that Zyni’s first language is not English.

There is what I think is a confusion as to bound declarations in the Common Lisp standard. I may be wrong about this, but I think I’m correct.

In a previous article my friend Zyni wrote some variations on a list-flattening function, some of which were ‘recursive’ and some of which ‘iterative’, managing the stack explicitly. We thought it would be interesting to see what the performance differences were, both for this function and a more useful variant which searches a tree rather than flattening it.