I kind of guessed that the ABCL motto didn't come from fellow MPLS resident Westerberg. But I kind of like him and the 'Mats too much to *not* sneak that reference in even if it is historically incorrect. Paul On Jul 30, 2009, at 12:10 AM, Mark Evenson wrote:

Just a nit pick on cause and effect: as far as I can tell from five minutes searching the web, Paul Westerberg wrote the song "Right to Arm Bears" around 2006, whereas the motto for ABCL has been around since the late 1990s. It's cool that HE might be a ABCL user, as I was always a huge Replacements fan! The exact source of the the ABCL motto remains a mystery to me, but perhaps others more steeped in the lore of the Bear can advise?

Thanks! I'll fix that up when I get home from work tonight. Paul On Jul 30, 2009, at 2:48 AM, Alessio Stalla wrote:

On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 2:38 AM, Paul Reiners<paul.reiners@gmail.com> wrote:

...

Some introductory user documentation I wrote on ABCL if anyone's interested:

http://www.automatous-monk.com/jvmlanguages/abcl/Armed_Bear_Common_Lisp.html

It's spread across a bunch of slides right now, because I first prepared it as a multi-slide presentation. I think I want to combine it all into one HTML page later this week when I get around to it. At the very least, I want to give each slide a meaningful title so that the Table of Contents is more meaningful.

Any criticism, constructive or destructive, is welcome.

Good work! It's nice to see introductory documentation for abcl.

Now the (constructive) criticism part :) I found an inaccuracy on Slide 10, regarding boxing/unboxing of values. Indeed boxing and unboxing is done automatically by ABCL. In your case, had you wrapped your ints in Fixnums instead of JavaObjects, you could have used them directly in Lisp. In general, since the user can't be expected to know how to map every Java type to Lisp and vice-versa, there are a couple of nice methods you can use in all cases:

public static LispObject JavaObject.getInstance(Object, boolean) converts (or wraps) a Java object to a Lisp object, if the boolean is true (else it just wraps it in a JavaObject).

public Object LispObject.javaInstance() converts (or unwraps) a Lisp object to Java. You can invoke this on any Lisp object, if it can't be converted, it will be returned as-is.

hth, Alessio

On 8/2/09 7:15 PM, Paul Reiners wrote:

I just finished making the corrections you suggested:

http://www.automatous-monk.com/jvmlanguages/abcl/Armed_Bear_Common_Lisp.html

I also improved the format a lot.

Would there be any interest in moving this over (or a modified version of this over) to the Armed Bear web site as a start on User Documentation?

I think we would be interested in including your contribution but you'll have to be a little patient with us for a more detailed reply. Erik, who has a pretty clear idea of presentation vis a vis the ABCL web pages, is on vacation until August 15. Thanks for the proposed contribution! Mark -- "A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare to it now."

I can do some work on cross-referencing the existing examples. I'll let you know when that's done. I can certainly get it done before the 15th. Paul On Mon, Aug 3, 2009 at 8:48 AM, Ville Voutilainen < ville.voutilainen@gmail.com> wrote:

between that and the documentation we have, and cross-referencing the existing examples would perhaps be nice, but it looks quite good to me. It'll

I did some more work on the page tonight: http://www.automatous-monk.com/jvmlanguages/abcl/Armed_Bear_Common_Lisp.html I did the following: Added some links to already existing code samples Added a "Calling Java from Lisp" section. This was basically taken from Ville's example code (for which I gave credit and linked to). Added a note at the bottom stating that the code samples in the article are released under the GPL Used the ABCL site style-sheet for the page I think I should add a navigation bar on the left that links to the sections, but I'm not going to do that tonight. If anyone has any other ideas for improvement, let me know. Paul On Aug 3, 2009, at 8:48 AM, Ville Voutilainen wrote:

I have read that doc a couple of times, and I like it. Sure, there's some duplication between that and the documentation we have, and cross-referencing the existing examples would perhaps be nice, but it looks quite good to me. It'll