LispForum

Actually, I am not sure how this works really, but I think so. Macros are normal functions after all, they are just called by the compiler on the source tree... of course, in my SBCL: CALL-ARGUMENTS-LIMIT is an external symbol in #<PACKAGE "COMMON-LISP">. It is a constant; its value is 536870911. An...

The numbers are actually a number of seconds from the Unix Epoch. CLISP also has arbitrary precision floats . Or course, those are slow. But in this particular case, if you may want to parse the seconds and second fraction as integers and either convert them to rational, or handle them separately. ...

I ran into a problem right away though when trying to write all which takes a predicate and a list, returning true when all the elements in the list satisfy the predicate. First, note that such function already exists: every . My first thought was that this is just a fold of the and operation into ...

Common Lisp doesn't have a concept of program as such. You just start an environment, load the code, and run a function you want. If you are on Linux and really want to launch "programs", you can investigate cl-launch . Or perhaps creating executables . But these are not the usual ways to develop an...

ahh, i expiremented a little .... and got it ... defparameter establish dynamic variable so "a" in (defun test (a) ...) is dynamic not lexical (that's is what confused me, i thought "a" is lexical inside the function) As far as I know, there is no way to un-special (ie. turn dynamic variable into l...

I dont get second example, it should see dynamic binding ... afik :) But you do see dynamic binding, so what is confusing? In the second example a is bound to symbol b, and the symbol-value returns, which is a function, returns the dynamic binding of b. In the first example a is bound to a, and the...

I still find myself having to load packages manually. Packages are not loaded (except in trivial sense, ie. in the same way all other Lisp code is). Packages are just namespaces, a way to associate strings with symbols. Most of the time you create a package, use other packages you want to be referr...

What is the difference between our-copy-list and our-copy-tree? Remeber, Common Lisp doesn't have lists as such, only conses, which can be thought of as pairs of pointers, each of which can point to either an atom, or a list. List and trees can be easily built from those. So, our-copy-list copies l...

that eval and compile would be perfect for building functions programmatically (although not closures if I understand correctly). What am I missing? Is there a better way? Building functions programmatically is usually achieved, as reuben.cornel shown, with macros. One reason use of eval and compil...

I would like to reduce memory consumption as much as it is reasonable before processing this archive. Well, it is hard to say anything specific without looking at the code, but note that with generational garbage collection allocating and the throwing away object is pretty fast, so usually you only...