LispForum

I agree with some of your sentiment, but I think it's a lost cause at some level. Every industry goes through the same thing. If you think about cars, for instance, they used to be produced by craftsmen, one at a time. Craft production was very expensive; every car was slightly different. There was ...

I've started playing a lot with Racket myself over the past few weeks and I'm quite impressed. I love that it's a "batteries included" language that provides a lot of infrastructure for graphics, windowing, etc. The module system is powerful and helps overcome some of the Lisp-1 issues ass...

Personally, I have never understood the Lispers that want to avoid CLOS at all costs and use closures for everything. While I do think CLOS can be overused, primarily by people with strong OOP backgrounds who haven't learned to think in terms of functions and high-order programming, objects are stil...

You could write your own basic reader. If the files you're processing are just basic sexprs, without fancy read-table stuff going on, then a basic reader is really pretty simple to build. You could do it such that you parse the file while retaining the comments. Not ideal, surely, but once you are a...

Numbers don't have a base. Printed representations of numbers have a base. Thus, base is relevant only when reading and printing numbers. Decimal 5 is the same number as binary 101 (the number five). It's not a conversion. It's the same number. This is a good point. Numbers are really abstract conc...

filfil, was the usage you found in performance critical code, or just a macro expander? If the latter, it seems like a false economy. Better to use ,@ and avoid the possibility of bugs caused by destructively modifying the following form, IMO. Generally, if your macro expander runs incrementally slo...

I like. I have thought about creating something similar for years. It will be interesting to see what the uptake is like.

Fly all your Lisp flags at half-mast:
http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/38977/

August wrote:Style-wise, do people generally use the #' when using lambda as a function argument and when returning a lambda from a function?

Generally, yes, people use #'(LAMBDA ...).

I think the main reason why there are both :test and :test-not is that Lisp originally was designed by mathematicians and testing numerical results often requires heavy complicated :test functions and often it's easier to write a :test-not math-test to exclude the opposite of the desired numbers. I...