LispForum

You can convert rationals to floats:

Since floating point numbers are represented internally as numbers by the base of two there isn't a way to represent 0.001 exactly. There will always be rounding errors. This isn't a problem of Lisp but of floating point arithmetic in general. The only way around it is to print it rounded: (format t...

You may think of a symbol as having two slots, one for the variable value and one for the functional value. If the evaluator encounters a symbol then it looks up the variable value. But if it encounters a form like (sym args ...) then it looks up the functional value for sym and calls that function ...

IMO, throwing away the standard just to rename a few functions isn't a good idea. Cleanning up CL by adding features won't work. Cleaning up CL by making it community driven is a contradiction in itself. To justify a new common lisp the community had to come up with serious new language design ideas...

Macro forms are expanded only at places where a function call may be placed. Since (COND (COND-CLAUSE (= C 8) 1)) didn't work if COND-CLAUSE was a function it also doesn't work if its a macro.

If you are looking for a way to determine the lambda list of a function then: yes, it's possible. But its implementation dependent. For example, in Clozure CL you can determine the lambda list with ccl:arglist:

? (ccl:arglist #'mapcar)
->(FUNCTION LIST &REST CCL::MORE-LISTS)

underablackrainbow wrote:Hi. Can someone tell me if a method can be used outside of a generic function?

Yes. They can be used just like ordinary functions.

EDIT: this is nonsense. i mixed up methods with generic functions.

ok thanks for reporting and fast explanation !! then when I define a func with &rest and also keyword parameters , I can pass it only keyword args… because it can’t accept (in this case) a variable number of arguments….right?... Yes. but ther’s a way to mix ‘really’ &rest and &a...

&key may be seen as the same as &rest but with an extra convinience feature of parsing the rest argument as a list of key/value pairs. Common Lisp allows you to use &rest together with &key because sometimes you want to pass on the keyword arguments to another function unchanged. For...