LispForum

It is technically doable. If you are confused about backquotes and commas then remember that they are purely syntax, you can always write it out using standard list manipulation functions, which is more verbose but sometimes more clear. But, although that it is hard to tell without knowing in more d...

Actually, a lot of the problem here is not with FUNCALL itself but with the fact that FUNCALL screens optimizations. If you pass as a predicate not #'<, which is generic multi-argument function, but (lambda (a b) (declare (fixnum a b)) (< a b)) it will reduce the time by more that half alone. Of cou...

Is it the case that the defcstruct name can be arbitrary and is not referenced against the exported c symbols? I am reasonably sure that this is in fact the case. CFFI in general doesn't enforce type safety of foreign data, you can refer to any piece of memory you own as any type. And C doesn't exp...

The manual is quite explicit on the difference: The mem-aref function is similar to mem-ref but will automatically calculate the offset from an index. To elaborate, the optional argument to those functions is treated differently, in mem-ref the offset is in bytes, but in mem-aref the offset is the i...

I think I've got rid of them now although I'm still using the setq command within the while-loop, because I can't quite figure out where I should put the end-bracket of let otherwise Sorry, I misspoke, you shouldn't create variables with SETQ, because they will be set as global variables and leak o...

In Lisp all parentheses are usually meaningful, they are not just grouping/block delimiters. In your case you have superfluous parentheses around the else branch of IF and around the body of WHILE. This makes the system interpret those as function calls, and an entire expression does not name a func...

It seems to work. Are you sure you defined the function as included, and not some other version?

If you have a large quasiquoted block in the macro often you can extract it into a function, and then use a macro to just wrap a body with a lambda like this: (defun call-with-words-in-string (s whites thunk) (do ((end 0 (1+ end)) (start 0) (word) (len 0)) ((= end (1+ (length s)))) (if (or (= end (l...

In Common Lisp you can access the function value of a binding with FUNCTION special operator or create an anonymous function with LAMBDA.

You can read a more explanatory explanation than the specification in Practical Common Lisp.

Use the AND macro. This is fairly trivial question, perhaps reading a book like Practical Common Lisp would be faster than waiting for an answer on a forum (relevant chapter).