LispForum

Because of timing and technical difficulties, the submission deadline
for the 2009 International Lisp Conference has been extended from
December 9, 2009, to December 16, 2009.

For information about the conference, please see ilc09.org.

-- Dan

Many of the good ideas that came from Lisp, such as garbage collection, are now available in other languages. One of the key ideas of Lisp that's still hard to find in other languages is the Lisp macro system, and all it can do. When I am talking to non-Lisp people about Lisp, I often make this poin...

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS INTERNATIONAL LISP CONFERENCE 2009 Lisp: The Next 50 Years http://www.international-lisp-conference.org Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA March 22-25, 2009 Sponsored by the Association of Lisp Users General Information: The Association of Lisp U...

There have been high-quality Lisp programs that do great graphics by calling out to the OpenGL library. InspireData does this and it looks very nice.

The syntax: It's just unfamiliar to people, and they don't already realize that you're expected to use a text editor that automatically indents lines. I like mhaggag's point about the C curly braces being foreign to Python programmers; it's very much the same thing. Too many choices: You mean, choic...

You ought not get a warning for a forward reference to a function. Lisp compilers generally defer these checks until the end of a "compilation unit", so that it will only tell you that a function is undefined if the function was not seen in this compilation unit, or earlier in the compilat...

The compiler macro feature is definitely an advanced feature. I'm not even entirely sure I've ever written one myself. Here's an example. If I'm not mistaken, the idea here is to optimize out the need for the "if" at runtime, in a common case. It's not at all clear that this optimization i...

There isn't any built-in CLOS concept of "parent" or "child" in the sense in which you mean it. If your model is that there are games and balls, and there's a one-to-one relationship between them, you's model that using slots. The game would have a slot set to the ball object, an...

My survey paper at http://common-lisp.net/~dlw/LispSurvey.html describes all eleven currently-maintained Common Lisp implementations, and has lots and lots of pointers to textbooks, papers, resources, and so on.

Which leads me to my question: is it considered acceptable style to use eval to do something like this? I typically shun the use of eval in other languages, because it's usually just a cheap way of getting something done which could be handled in more elegant ways, but with the data-is-code orienta...