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[pro] Common Lisp replacement for noweb
by William Halliburton 28 Mar '11

28 Mar '11

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: daly <daly(a)axiom-developer.org> Date: Mon, Mar 28, 2011 at 12:18 PM Subject: Common Lisp replacement for noweb To: thomas.m.hermann(a)odonata-research.com, pro(a)common-lisp.net I have moved from using noweb to a pure Common Lisp version of literate programming. (The source is also at: http://literatesoftware.com/tangle.lisp ) The noweb program uses two functions, weave -- takes a file and extracts latex tangle - takes a file and extracts running code The noweb syntax is: <<thechunk>>= your source code @ where your code is defined in the block delimited by the <<...>>= and the @ symbol. To use the delimited chunk somewhere you write the name of the chunk as: <<thechunk>> It would be better to use a valid latex environment. That would mean that there is no need for a "weave" function since the original file is valid latex. \begin{chunk}{thechunk} your code here \end{chunk} \getchunk{thechunk} All that would be left is to make Common Lisp understand the latex environment syntax which is trivial to do. So I wrote a tangle.lisp program. It accepts and processes both the old noweb syntax and the new latex syntax. The idea is simple. Read the file, hash the chunks, and expand them when a getchunk is found. The code is attached. Send questions to daly(a)literatesoftware.com Tim Daly daly(a)axiom-developer.org daly(a)literatesoftware.com

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[pro] Matrix operations...
by Pascal Costanza 28 Mar '11

28 Mar '11

Hi, I am looking for a Common Lisp library that provides some essential mathematical matrix/vector operations. There seem to be a couple of offerings, but it seems hard to determine in what kind of state they are (without essentially trying them all one by one). If anybody could share his/her experience, I would be very grateful. Some (soft) requirements: - It should be implemented in "pure" Common Lisp. Preferably no wrappers for libraries implemented in other languages. - Preferably sequential, but parallel implementations may also be fine. - Focus on performance (incl. low-level type declarations, for example). - Preferred platform is LispWorks, but other Common Lisp implementations are also fine. Portability is not a high priority. Thanks a lot in advance, Pascal -- Pascal Costanza, ExaScience Lab, Intel Belgium

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[pro] Bottom-up, top-down or both ?
by Didier Verna 11 Mar '11

11 Mar '11

It is well known that a functional approach to programming helps thinking in a top-down fashion. Idioms made available by first-class functions (e.g. mapping and folding) help you write down the general ideas first, and worry about the details later. Paul Graham has nice examples of that in On Lisp IIRC. In fact, it seems that being able to think in a top-down fashion is not specifically tied to functional programming, but perhaps more generally to the level of expressiveness that your language provides. For example, I find that the very existence of a REPL helps a lot: you can test a function on manually-provided data, that would normally be constructed by a lower-level, yet-to-be-written function. You can pre-define stuff to do nothing but print "I'm here", just to check if the bigger thing works. In Lisp, with half-defined generic functions, you can even have your program half-working, some details remaining to be sorted out later. So obviously, Lisp being as expressive as it is, is of great help in thinking top-down. Even in Lisp, however, some things need to be defined before they can be used. So I recently discovered, to my greatest astonishment, that even if my thought process is top-down 99% of the time, my /code/ is *always* written down in a bottom-up fashion. Occasionally, I might have one of those quasi-hysterical crisis in which I would spend hours re-organizing my code until the I get the overall expression of the program as close as possible to the ultimate upside-down pyramid of dependencies. And then, we I need to immerse myself again into something I wrote a long time ago, I usually read my files backwards... or not! So I was wondering, how's your code organized? How's your thought process organized? Top-down? Bottom-up? Both? -- 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] slime help
by Alexandre Rademaker 11 Mar '11

11 Mar '11

Hello, Sorry if this list is not the best place to ask this question... Maybe we should create a newbie lisp list! What is the easy way to copy/paste a form from a source code buffer to slime prompt? Is there any keyboard shortcut emacs/slime-mode to copy the whole body of a form from anywhere within it?? Cheers, Alexandre Rademaker http://web.me.com/arademaker/

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[pro] [Final CfPart] European Lisp Symposium, Hamburg, March 31 - April 1
by Didier Verna 09 Mar '11

09 Mar '11

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 4th European Lisp Symposium Special Focus on Parallelism & Efficiency March 31 - April 1st, 2011 TUHH, Hamburg University of Technology Hamburg, Germany http://www.european-lisp-symposium.org/ Sponsors: EPITA, TUHH, Lispworks, Franz Inc., NovaSparks and Freiheit ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ News: ~~~~~ * The final program is now online. * The early registration deadline is in 3 days, so hurry! Registration will still be possible afterwards. Invited Speakers: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Craig Zilles -- Compiling for the common case Marc Battyani -- Reconfigurable computing on steroids Apostolos Syropoulos -- Scala: an OO surprise Scope ~~~~~~ The purpose of the European Lisp Symposium is to provide a forum for the discussion and dissemination of all aspects of design, implementation and application of any of the Lisp dialects, including Common Lisp, Scheme, Emacs Lisp, AutoLisp, ISLISP, Dylan, Clojure, ACL2, ECMAScript, Racket, SKILL and so on. We encourage everyone interested in Lisp to participate. The European Lisp Symposium 2011 invites high quality papers about novel research results, insights and lessons learned from practical applications, and educational perspectives. We also encourage submissions about known ideas as long as they are presented in a new setting and/or in a highly elegant way. This year's focus will be directed towards "Parallelism & Efficiency". Programme Chair ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Didier Verna - EPITA Research and Development Laboratory, France Local Chair ~~~~~~~~~~~~ Ralf Moeller - Hamburg University of Technology, Germany Programme Committee ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Antonio Leitao - Instituto Superior Tecnico/INESC-ID, Portugal Christophe Rhodes - Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK David Edgar Liebke - Relevance Inc., USA Didier Verna - EPITA Research and Development Laboratory, France Henry Lieberman - MIT Media Laboratory, USA Jay McCarthy - Brigham Young University, USA Jose Luis Ruiz Reina - Universidad de Sevilla, Spain Marco Antoniotti - Universita Milano Bicocca, Italy Manuel Serrano - INRIA, France Michael Sperber - DeinProgramm, Germany Pascal Costanza - Vrije Universiteit of Brussel, Belgium Scott McKay - ITA Software, USA -- 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] Reader macro definition in CLHS
by Kazimir Majorinc 02 Mar '11

02 Mar '11

------------------- reader macro n. 1. a textual notation introduced by dispatch on one or two characters that defines special-purpose syntax for use by the Lisp reader, and that is implemented by a reader macro function. See Section 2.2 (Reader Algorithm). 2. the character or characters that introduce a reader macro[1]; that is, a macro character or the conceptual pairing of a dispatching macro character and the character that follows it. (A reader macro is not a kind of macro.) ------------------- I do not understand item 1. In code ... (set-macro-character #\G (lambda(s c) 9.81)) (setf s (* (/ G 2) (* tt tt))) #\G is the reader-macro in a sense 2. What is the reader-macro in a sense 1.? Kazimir Majorinc

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[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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