One of my flaws when it comes to coding is lack of confidence, or you could call it lack of imagination.
At work we have some data files which are some funky binary format, readable only by some special program. This program has no command line interface. On a whim I thought […]

I made an RSS 2.0 feed for my origami gallery the other day. Thanks to CL-WHO this is trivial. Here’s the complete code:
;; RSS
(defun rss ()
(cl-who:with-html-output-to-string (s nil :prologue “<?xml version=\”1.0\” encoding=\”ISO-8859-1\” ?>”)
(:rss :version “2.0″ :|xmlns:atom| “http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom”
(:channel […]

Two posts in one, just because I can.
Rambling #1: One thing that makes a language like Ruby easy to read is that foo.bar always has the same meaning: object.method.
In Common Lisp you don’t have that. One of CL’s strengths is that everything looks the same, it’s all s-expressions. However a cost of this […]

I got through the first four chapters of PAIP yesterday and today. It’s good so far. I had reservations about spending $80 on a book, but it’s 950 pages and almost all of it is good stuff, from what I can see at a glance. Little space is wasted on introduction material […]

I ordered PAIP today. Good computer books are so expensive. It hurts me to spend $80 on a book. But there are many worse ways to spend $80 than on something which contains so much knowledge, I guess. I got a $25 gift card for a book store for Christmas, so […]

The SBCL download page shows version 1.0.14 released today, and it’s already in Portage (masked). The gentoo-lisp list says we got a new Lisp project lead recently. Looks like there’s plenty of Lisp going on in the Gentoo world. Personally I am very pleased with the state of Lisp in Gentoo.
Sometimes I […]

I spent four hours working on my photo-blog in Common Lisp that I’ve mentioned earlier.
Why does Common Lisp hate me? After four hours, I’m not yet even to the point where I can reliably, successfully load all the libraries I need to load. How pathetic is that? I haven’t even gotten to […]

I thought I sort of understood CLOS, until…
CL-USER> (defclass foo ()
((bar :initform "BAR" :accessor bar)))
 
#<STANDARD-CLASS FOO>
CL-USER> (defparameter *x* (make-instance ‘foo))
*X*
CL-USER> (bar *x*)
"BAR"
CL-USER> (defclass foo ()
((bar :initform "NEWBAR" :accessor bar)
(baz :initform "BAZ" :accessor baz)))
#<STANDARD-CLASS FOO>
CL-USER> (defparameter *y* (make-instance ‘foo))
*Y*
CL-USER> (bar *y*)
"NEWBAR"
CL-USER> (bar *x*)
"BAR"
CL-USER> (baz *y*)
"BAZ"
CL-USER> (baz […]

In Ruby, the only things that are false are nil and false. This is a nice change over other languages where other things evaluate to false in boolean tests. Like C and many others, which considers the integer 0 to be false. So is 0.0 false? How about 1e-999999? Or […]

In Scheme, an exclamation point (aka “bang”) on the end of a procedure name indicates a procedure with side-effects e.g. a destructive procedure or mutator. This is only a naming convention for procedures and isn’t understood or enforced by the language.
In Ruby you can also have an exclamation point on the end of a […]