Hello,
I am interested in using CL-Python as a front end for Lisp libraries. To this end, I wonder how to call a Lisp function from withing Python. I know you can enter " (foo bar)" to call a Lisp function, but its return value is not known to Python. I'd like to be able to do something like "x = foo(bar)".
Couple of questions related to this. How can I reference Lisp variables from Python and vice versa? Can I use import to load a Lisp file? After loading the Lisp file, how do functions and variables in it appear in Lisp --- does the Lisp package name come into play? What about Lisp symbols which contain characters not allowed in Python --- is there a way to escape them? Can a Lisp function return arbitrary Lisp objects, and if so how are those displayed in Python?
Thanks a lot to Willem Broekma for inventing and maintaining CL-Python. I think it's a great idea. My immediate interest is to use CL-Python as an interface for the symbolic computation system Maxima which is written in CL.
best, Robert Dodier