February 2011 - pro - mailman3.common-lisp.net

[pro] Common Lisp Library for MS Word files (.doc or .docx)?
by Mark H. David 01 Mar '11

01 Mar '11

Does anyone know of any CL libraries for dealing with Microsoft Word files? Tools for creating them, reading from them, parsing them, converting them to plain text or other formats, things like that? Thanks, -Mark

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[pro] Is cl-yacc going to cut it?
by Matthew D. Swank 15 Feb '11

15 Feb '11

I suppose this is only marginally related to common lisp, but everything I'm talking about is written in common lisp. I use cl-yacc for a lot of parsing, but one thing that has always seemed harder than it needs to be is writing lexers to feed it. One thing that I've found helpful is the creation of a custom lexer for each parser state by making the action table entry for that state available to the lexer. This provides the terminals the parser is looking for, and narrows the tokens the lexer has to look for at each step. However, this means I am also maintaining my own fork of cl-yacc. It seems (from my admittedly limited search) that this is not a common modification of yacc. Before I start bugging the maintainer about my changes, I want to know: am I abusing yacc? I do like the separation between low level tokenization the higher level symbol parse, but is there another general parsing technique, available as a lisp library of course, that either works at a lower level than yacc usually does or allows the lexer to access more context about the parse? Matt

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[pro] Final empty parameters to format directives
by Didier Verna 11 Feb '11

11 Feb '11

Hello, I just fell upon a case where implementations seem to differ on what to do. The question is how to interpret a format directive in which the last parameter is followed by a comma. Consider this test case: (defun fmt (stream argument colonp atsignp &rest params) (declare (ignore stream argument colonp atsignp)) (format t "~S~%" params)) (format t "~1,2/fmt/~%" t) (format t "~1,2,/fmt/~%" t) (format t "~1,2:/fmt/~%" t) (format t "~1,2,:/fmt/~%" t) Here's what you get from various implementations: SBCL / ECL / ABCL: (1 2) (1 2 NIL) (1 2) (1 2) CMU-CL / CCL / CLISP / Allegro / LispWorks: (1 2) (1 2) (1 2) (1 2) Funnily, my instinct tells me that nobody's right, as I would have expected to get this: (1 2) (1 2 NIL) (1 2) (1 2 NIL) Indeed, the parameters list is implicitely terminated by the directive character OR a colon / at-sign. So using a final comma seems to me like adding another, empty, parameter at the end. I'm willing to report those divergences to the respective implementations, but the problem is that I don't really know what to report :-) Who's right? No matter how I read the spec, I cannot make a decision and it seems to me that this is an unspecified corner case. I reckon it's probably not a big deal, but this could be a problem for user-defined functions relying on the actual number of parameters that they get. Comments? -- Resistance is futile. You will be jazzimilated. Scientific site: http://www.lrde.epita.fr/~didier Music (Jazz) site: http://www.didierverna.com

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[pro] Are you an Imager or a Filer?
by Ala'a Mohammad 10 Feb '11

10 Feb '11

Hi, I'm continually learning Common-lisp and trying to find the best style that suites me better. I've tried 'an imager' style (cooking a an image with all required libraries loaded when required), and 'a filer' style (loading files or systems each time I fire-up a CL implementation). I'm interested to hear what others use CL. How do they manage day to day work? how do their preferred style mesh into their production pipeline (coding, debugging, deployment and maintenance)? and what makes them prefer one way over another or the mix if applicable? Regards, Ala'a Mohammad.

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[pro] awk
by Daniel Weinreb 04 Feb '11

04 Feb '11

Has anybody written a domain-specific-language set of macros (or functions) to provide "awk" functionality from Common Lisp, with roughly the kind of brevity that awk users like? -- Dan

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[pro] 404 animals
by Daniel Weinreb 03 Feb '11

03 Feb '11

There appears to be a new trend of putting cute animals on your HTTP 404 page. Twitter has a "Fail Whale", and now Tumblr has "TumblBeasts": http://www.observer.com/2011/tech/tumblr-adds-oatmeals-suggested-tumbeasts-… Perhaps we can have an easy way to make Lisp-based web sites use the "powered by alien technology" cute green creature? :) -- Dan

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