On Fri, 4 Jan 2008 17:20:41 -0500, terrence.x.brannon@jpmchase.com wrote:
Hello, I know this is more of just a pure Lisp question, but i cannot figure out how to get my Lisp program to use cl-ppcre without having to prefix the function calls with 'cl-ppcre'
Your technical question was answered already, but I suspect (I may be wrong, of course) that you make the same mistake many Lisp newbies make - you're confusing packages and systems. A "package" is a first-class Lisp object defined in the ANSI standard. You can read about it here for example:
http://gigamonkeys.com/book/programming-in-the-large-packages-and-symbols.ht...
(Read the whole book if you haven't done so already.)
A "system" (that's a common usage of the name although there's no fixed definition for it) is something that's defined by a defsystem facility like ASDF - it's more or less a collection of source files plus instructions on how they are to be compiled.
Very often there's a system and a package of the same name, like it's the case for CL-PPCRE. That doesn't have to be the case, though. The names could be different, one system could define more than one package or no package at all, you can define a package without defining a system, etc.
HTH, Edi.