This repo contains a collection of small Common Lisp toys I’ve written over the last thirty-odd years. These are explicitly toys: they’re little things which I wrote for amusement and which I decided might one day be useful either to me or someone else.
These toys may make their way into a more formal place, such as my Lisp hax repo. When that happens they’ll vanish from here (perhaps with a note). There will therefore never be releases from this repo and you should never assume stability of what’s here. These are just, well, toys.
The documentation is generally rather sparse, and it’s also just in the order I wrote it. Some of the toys may work, some may not. Some may never have worked.
All of these things are independent modules, providing something which looks like org.tfeb.toys.<module>. There is no ASDF or other system definition for all of them. If they need other things either from amongst themselves or from other modules I’ve written they’ll do so using require-module which you’ll need to have installed in that case, or if you don’t to have loaded those modules some other way. In the case that they need things written by other people or other larger systems they’ll do that using Quicklisp. Some of them do the former, only regex-case currently does the latter.
All of the toys purport to be portable Common Lisp, although several of them need each other and other things.
The repo from which the toys are published was invented in 2021, but some of them are much older than that. Some of that history exists but not in the publication repo.
All of the toys use domain-structured names: packages, modules, features and so on have names which start with a reversed DNS domain and then continue to divide further. The prefix for all of the toys is org.tfeb.toys. See the TFEB.ORG tools documentation for a little more on this. If they move elsewhere, these names will change.
locatives will likely end up in my hax repo, as will fluids. glex I’m not sure about. regex-case is probably on the way although perhaps in some altered form.
simple-loops, metatronic and slog, which formerly lived here, have now migrated to the hax repo.
forThis lets you define iterators for objects by defining methods on iterator which typically returns a function. next (another generic function) should then know how to get the next element from an iterator: for an iterator which is a function it just calls it with itself as an argument. for is a macro which will loop over objects, calling iterator to make the iterator & next to get the next values. Finally there is a gather macro which is a bit like Python’s list comprehensions (or what I thought they were like in 2004).
As an example a simplified method on iterate for lists could be:
(defmethod iterator ((l list) &key)
(lambda (self)
(if l
(values
(prog1 (first l)
(setf l (rest l)))
self)
(values nil exhausted-iterator))))
And you could then gather the elements of a list which are odd numbers like this:
(gather (* x x)
for (x '(1 2 t 3))
when (numberp x)
when (oddp x))
Note that for & when are not loop-style keywords: gather turns them into (when ...), so they’re just the normal CL macros1:
(gather (* x x)
for (x '(1 2 t 3))
when (numberp x)
when (oddp x))
-> (let ((#:a 'nil) (#:at 'nil))
(for (x '(1 2 t 3))
(when (numberp x)
(when (oddp x)
(if #:a
(setf (cdr #:at) (list (* x x)) #:at (cdr #:at))
(setf #:a (list (* x x)) #:at #:a)))))
#:a)
for lives in org.tfeb.toys.for and provides :org.tfeb.toys.for.
I fairly heavily revised for in 2022: the protocol iterators support has partly changed, the function formerly known as iter is nowiterator, and there have been a number of other significant changes: the new version is not particularly compatible with the old one.
case into an explicit jump table: ncasencase is just like casebut it can turn case statements into explicit jump tables if they are large enough. From the comments in the file:
This is actually not a really good example because the compiler is likely to be able to do a better job of the decisions involved, and it can also use real jumps rather than function calls which only may turn into jumps.
I can’t see a case where ncase would be useful today, but it’s there.
ncase lives in org.tfeb.toys.ncase and provides :org.tfeb.toys.ncase.
glexCL only has global special variables, which are dynamically scoped. But it’s easy to fake global variables which are lexically scoped using symbol macros. That’s what glex does.
defglex is like defvar: (defglex x) will define x as a global lexical but not give it an initial value, while (defglex x 1) will give it an initial value as well. You can provide documentation strings.
defglex* is like defparameter: you can’t omit the value and it is set each time.
make-glex-readtable will construct a readtable in which #$x refers to a global lexical variable x. It has three keyword arguments:
from is the readtable to copy, defaultly *readtable*;to is the readtable to copy into, defaultly nil;dollar is the subcharacter to use, defaultly #\$.Example:
> (setf *readtable* (make-glex-readtable))
#<readtable 4020064633>
> (setf #$x 1)
1
> #$x
1
> (defglex x)
x
> x
1
glex lives in org.tfeb.toys.glex and provides :org.tfeb.toys.glex.
parametersThis lets you wrap special variables in functions and provides forms which will ‘bind’ these named functions.
define-parameter is like defvar. define-parameter* is like defparameter. parameterize is like let, parameterize* is like let*
An example:
(define-parameter hugeness 10 "how huge a thing is")
(print (hugeness))
(parameterize ((hugeness 20))
(print (hugeness)))
will print 10 and then 20.
parameters lives in org.tfeb.toys.parameters and provides :org.tfeb.toys.parameters.
See also fluids, below.
composable-readtable-makerSomething I often find myself wanting to do is to make two or more changes to a readtable with the intention that these changes are orthogonal to each other. Without writing special code each time this is hard to ensure. Solving this problem is what composable readtable makers are for.
A readtable maker is an object which encapsulates a set of changes to make to a readtable – it’s almost but not quite a readtable factory2. A composable readtable maker is a readtable maker which can be composed with another readtable maker to either produce a readtable maker which will be compatible with both, or signal an error if that is not possible.
Composing composable readtable makers produces a composable readtable maker which is compatible with all of them. However, making a readtable from this object may still change it in incompatible ways: that problem isn’t something I tried to solve.
Composable readtable makers are almost but not quite simple to implement. The bit which isn’t simple is also the thing that limits them: copying character syntax. This is fiddly because it can be order-dependent in general and because you might want to do things such as swap the syntaxes of two characters. So this is all avoided: you can only specify how to copy character syntax in a way which is both loop free and order-independent. Checking this is mildly fiddly.
To deal with limitations like those that apply to character syntax, there are also ‘special orders’ which are simply lists of functions which get called.
hidden-slotsSome people want slots in classes defined with defclass to be private to those objects. There is, of course, nothing stopping you saying that they are: CLOS is best regarded as a system for writing object systems. If you want things to look like a message-passing system then CLOS can let you do that, if you want slots to be private then CLOS can do that. In the presence of macros and an effectively-standard MOP you can construct whatever system suits you as The Art of the Metaobject Protocol makes very clear: CL is a language which assumes its users are humans, not sheep. What’s more, CL is so powerful and expressive that these systems can be written in minutes, not hours or days: hidden-slots took well under an hour to write in its initial, fully-functional version.
hidden-slots provides a macro, defclass/hs, which lets you make slots private to the class where they are defined. defclass/hs is exactly like defclass except that all slot names are rewritten to be gensyms:
(defclass/hs foo ()
((x ...)))
(defclass/hs bar (foo)
((x ...)))
will result in instances of bar having two slots, not one. defclass/hs however lets a class say that it is a ‘friend’ of one or more other classes, which means it can see their secret slot names:
(defclass/hs foo ()
((x ...)))
(defclass/hs bar (foo)
((x ...))
(:friends foo))
will result in instances of bar having only one slot. Friendship is unilateral: a class can’t say who it will allow to be its friends3. Note that friendship has nothing to do with inheritance:
(defclass foo ()
((x ...)))
(defclass bar ()
((x ...))
(:friends foo))
(defclass bone (foo bar)
())
will cause instances of bone to have one slot which will unify the slots of foo and bar.
All this is done based on class names: there’s no fancy MOP stuff here.
One consequence of hidden slots is that you can’t, for instance, know if a slot is bound in an instance, or easily poke around without using MOP functionality to get the slots which exist. Well, sometimes you need to do things like that, so there are some tools to let you find out about hidden slots: slot-name-for-instance returns the slot name for an instance corresponding to the name you give; slot-name-for-class returns the slot name for a class (you need both of these because you might want to define metaclasses with hidden slots). Neither of these check if the slot actually exists: they will remap hidden slot names but for any other slot name they’ll just return the name. with-hidden-slots is a variant of with-slots which will remap slot names (you need to tell it the class name to remap for, of course).
Finally there are two maintenance functions: hidden-slot-class-names tells you the names of classes which have hidden slots, and clear-hidden-slots-for-class-name will cause that class name to forget its hidden slot mapping (which, until you redefine the class, means that its slots now really are irrevocably hidden unless you use the MOP to find them).
It does not work to say you are the friend of a class which is not yet defined, because its name mappings don’t yet exist.
hidden-slots is explicitly a toy: I wrote it just as an example of how easy it is to do something like this. Something like it might be fine as part of a program, but I don’t think it’s library-quality (and still less language-quality) code.
fluidsProgrammers in languages which don’t have dynamic variables inevitably have to invent them, either by some horrible non-thread-safe shallow-binding approach or more nicely. Quite often, of course, people writing in such languages don’t even know they’re reinventing dynamic variables: such is the state of education in computing.
Python doesn’t have dynamic variables, but it does have enough portable mechanism to invent them, with a thread-safe deep-binding approach. A while ago when I was writing Python for my living I did that, in a module called nfluids4, which I should get around to publishing. Fluids in this implementation were functions which looked up their value on a secretly maintained, thread-local, binding stack which was maintained by with ... constructs, thus giving you deep binding.
A nice feature of this approach is that it solves the ‘dynamically bind a field/slot in an object’ problem: a fluid doesn’t change, but the binding it accesses does, since the fluid is essentially a key into the binding stack. And in a Lisp-1, like Python, it’s also pretty elegant.
Well, although CL has dynamic variables, the dynamic-slot-binding problem still exists. Here’s an example. Given
(defstruct foo
(x 1))
let’s imagine I have a foo and I want, dynamically, to bind foo-x to 2. Here’s a horrible approach to doing that:
(let ((old-x (foo-x it)))
(unwind-protect
(progn (setf (foo-x it) 2) ...)
(setf (foo-x it) old-x)))
This is terrible because it’s not thread-safe, and, in any implementation with real concurrency it can’t be made so.
Here’s how this would look with fluids:
(defstruct foo
(x (make-fluid :value 1)))
(fluid-let (((foo-x it) 2))
...
(fluid-value (foo-x it))
...)
This is less pretty than the implementation in a Lisp-1: even if fluids were functions (which they’re not, in this implementation) you’d still need some equivalent of fluid-value (which might just be funcall) in a Lisp-2. But it is thread-safe because, of course, it secretly uses a dynamic variable on which the dynamic bindings of fluids are consed.
There are several possible obvious implementations of fluids: all a fluid really needs to be is a unique object which can serve as a key into the binding stack, and also which can store a global value somehow. Two obvious implementations are symbols (keeping the global value in symbol-value or on the property list of the symbol) or conses, keeping the global value in the cadr of the cons (the reason for this is so it’s possible for the fluid not to be bound, which I wanted). Both of these implementations have the problem (which my Python implementation using functions did have) that you can’t easily write a fluidp predicate, which I wanted. So this implementation uses a CLOS object for fluids, relying on the ability of its single slot not to be bound to support unbound fluids. There’s an implementation which uses conses in the history of the repo.
Here is a rough description of the interface.
make-fluid makes a fluid. It has two keyword arguments:
value will give the fluid a global value – without it the fluid will be globally unbound (unless it got its value from from);from will copy a fluid, which just means copying its global (not local!) value if any.fluidp tells you if an object is a fluid.
fluid-value accesses the binding of a fluid:
(fluid-value f) will retrieve the current dynamically-apparent binding of f or signal an error if it is unbound;(setf (fluid-value f) ...) will set the binding, and will signal an error if the fluid is unbound;(fluid-value f t) will retrieve the global binding of f, and will signal an error if there is no global binding;(setf (fluid-value f t) ...) will set the global binding, and will succeed even if there is no current global binding.The second argument does not need to be t: it just needs to be not nil as you’d expect. This is true below as well.
fluid-boundp tells you things about whether a fluid is bound. It is slightly complicated.
(fluid-boundp f) returns two values: whether a fluid is bound at all, and whether it has a global binding. Not all possibilities can happen, since if a fluid has is not bound it can’t have a toplevel binding (see below).(fluid-boundp f t) returns two values: whether a global binding exists and whether a dynamic binding exists. In this case all the possibilities can happen.fluid-makunbound makes a fluid be globally unbound. Although it’s possible to construct an implementation where a fluid is locally unbound but globallybound by having a special ‘not bound’ value which can be the value of a local binding (and it is at least arguable that this can happen in CL with makunbound and special variables, see the discussion here), I decided that such an approach was perverse, so fluids don’t support that. So fluid-makunbound will succeed only if there is no local binding for the fluid and wil signal an error otherwise. This is why fluid-boundp can’t return all the possibilities, of course.
define-fluid is just a wrapper around defvar which defines a fluid as a global variable. I’m not sure it should exist, but it does.
call/fluid-bindings calls its first argument with the fluids and values which are its remaining values bound. Example:
(let ((f (make-fluid)))
(call/fluid-bindings (lambda () (fluid-value f)) f 3))
will evaluate to 3.
fluid-let is a macro version of call/fluid-bindings:
(let ((f (make-fluid :value 4)))
(fluid-let ((f 5))
(fluid-value f)))
evaluates to 5. Note that fluid-let evaluates both parts of each pair of fluid & value:
(let ((c (cons (make-fluid) nil)))
(fluid-let (((car c) 5))
(fluid-value (car c))))
does what it looks like.
fluid-let* is to fluid-let what let* is to let.
fluid-error is the class of error conditions related to fluids: fluid-error-fluid will retrieve the offending fluid.
unbound-fluid-error is a subclass of fluid-error which is signalled when a fluid is unexpectedly unbound.
bound-fluid-error is a subclass of fluid-error which is signalled when a fluid is unexpectedly bound: this only happens when you try and call fluid-makunbound on a fluid with a local binding.
fluids lives in org.tfeb.toys.fluids and provides org.tfeb.toys.fluids. It is probably on its way to becoming something more than a toy (when its package will change).
descopeI quite often find I make mistakes like the following when I’m taking a bit of code which uses some variable and modifying it to use something derived from it, but then forgetting to replace all the references to the outer variable:
(defun foo (l)
(let ((l1 (function-of l)))
...
(let ((l2 (another-function-of l1)))
... update l2 ...
... (when (null l1) (return ...)) ...)))
So I wrote a little macro which makes it possible to say ‘these variables are now out of scope’.
descoping is a macro in the body of which one or more variables are out of scope:
(let ((y (f x)))
(descoping (x)
... references to x are now errors ...))
It does this the way you would expect: it binds the symbols in its first arguments as symbol-macros which create a compile-time warning and a run-time error. The warning is a descoped-variable-warning and the error is a descoped-variable-error and they’re both subclasses of descoped-variable.
I used this exactly once to help me fix idiocies in a program I was modifying: I think it’s only real use is to demonstrate just how much you make make the language do for you.
It is in org.tfeb.toys.descope and provides org.tfeb.toys.descope.
spaghettiprocedure calls may be usefully thought of as GOTO statements which also pass parameters – Guy Steele, Lambda: the ultimate GOTO
If you use spaghetti you do actually have a GOTO which passes arguments. It has constructs, labelling and labelling*, within which you can define labels with forms like (label name [arguments]) and (label* name [arguments]): ‘invoking’ a label consists of assigning values corresponding to its arguments, if any, and then jumping to the place it’s defined. Here’s an example:
(labelling ((i 0))
(label top (i))
(print i)
(when (< i 10)
(top (1+ i)))
i)
Here top is label, and (top x) jumps to that label, assigning a value to i. This can be made more concise (perhaps opaque would be a better word):
(labelling ((i 0))
(label top (&optional (i (1+ i))))
(print i)
(when (< i 10)
(top))
i)
In this form the label defined by top has an optional argument and will increment iif it is not given. So you can easily write this horrid thing:
(defun foo (n m)
(labelling ((i 0) (j 0))
(label top (&key (i (1+ i)) (j j)))
(when (= i m)
(top :i 0 :j (1+ j)))
(when (= j n)
(bottom))
(format t "~&i=~D j=~D~%" i j)
(top)
(label bottom)
(values)))
And now:
> (foo 2 2)
i=0 j=0
i=1 j=0
i=0 j=1
i=1 j=1
Why you would want to write this escapes me, but you could.
labelling is a form which binds zero or more variables the way let does, and the body of which is an implicit progn except that the label form may be used to establish labels. It establishes an implicit block named nil so return return-from will escape from it. Declarations are allowed at the start of the body.
labelling* is like labelling except that the initial bindings are done sequentially, like let*.
label is a form which can be used only within labelling / labelling*. It has two syntaxes:
(label name) extablishes name as a label, and then (name) will jump to that label.
(label name arglist) establishes name as a label, but ‘invoking’ name now will perform a number of assignments to the variables named in the arglist before the jump. These assignments happen in parallel (like psetq). You can use &optional, &key and &aux in the arglist: &aux is useful when you want to have an assignment which can’t be overridden. No other lambda-list keywords are allowed.
It’s probably easiest to explain what happens with a couple of examples.
(label foo (x y)) then (foo 1 2) corresponds to (progn (psetq x 1 y 2) (go foo).(label foo (&optional (i (1+ i))) then
(foo) corresponds to (progn (psetq i (1+ i)) (go foo));(foo 1) is (progn (psetq i 1) (go foo)).(label foo (&key (x x) (y 0)) then the assignments happen to the default values specified or to the arguments given, if any.(label foo (&aux (i (1+ i)))) then (foo) will always increment i.label* is the same as label except that assignments ae done sequentially: with setq rather than psetq. The order of the assignments depends on their order in the arglist, not the order they are given in when invoking the label: this can be different for keyword arguments. So, for example
(labelling ((a 1) (b 2))
(end)
(label end (&aux (a (1+ 1)) (b (1+ a))))
(values a b))
evaluates to 2 and 2, while
(labelling ((a 1) (b 2))
(end)
(label* end (&aux (a (1+ 1)) (b (1+ a))))
(values a b))
evaluates to 2 and 3.
Notes.
label are macros, not local functions. That means, for instance, keyword argument processing happens at macroexpansion time and will have no runtime cost at all.labelling / labelling*.label* is probably more natural (and perhaps more efficient) than labelwhile having a less natural name. But the analogy with let* / let was too close for me to want to swap them.It is in org.tfeb.toys.spaghetti and provides org.tfeb.toys.spaghetti.
sb-readtableCL, being a Lisp-2, makes it somewhat verbose to pass functions around as arguments: you end up with a lot of (funcall x ...)s in code. sb-readtable makes it so that [x ...] is read as (funcall x ...), and it can do other things as well. You can in fact control what the pair of bracket characters are if you want to do that.
The readtable constructed by make-sb-readtable lets you read forms like [...]. Normally [...] reads as (<op> ...) where <op> is the value of *sb-operator-name*. (which by default is funcall). However, if *sb-transformer* is not nil, then it is used to transform the form read into anything it wants to. Note that both of these things happen at read time.
make-sb-readtable returns a readtable in which #\[ (or any character you specify) is defined to read a form as described above, and #\] (or any other character you specify) is an error. It has three keyword arguments:
brackets should be a list of an open and close bracket character, and is by default (#\[ #\]);from-readtable is the readtable to copy, defaultly *readtable*to-readtable is the readtable to copy into, defaultly nil.from-readtable and to-readtable have the same semantics as for copy-readtable.
*sb-operator-name* is the operator name interposed by default in [...] syntax. Defaultly it is funcall.
*sb-transformer* is either nil or a designator for a function of two arguments: the form read by [...] and the stream it was read from. Its result is used as the value of the read form. It’s passed the stream so it can signal useful read-time errors. Default value is nil.
sb-readtable lives in org.tfeb.toys.sb-readtable and provides org.tfeb.toys.sb-readtable.
locativesZetalisp had special things called locatives which were a bit like pointers. I can’t remember how they worked but they needed hardware support I am fairly sure. What this code does is invent an object called a ‘locative’, constructed with the locative macro, which encapsulates a reference to a place. locf will then retrieve the value of that place and (setf locf) will store a value in it. As an example:
> (let* ((x (list 1 2 3))
(loc (locative (cdr x))))
(locf loc))
(2 3)
> (let* ((x (list 1 2 3))
(loc (locative (cdr x))))
(setf (locf loc) 4)
x)
(1 . 4)
This works quite generally: given
(defun foo ()
(let ((y 8))
(bar (locative y))
y))
(defun bar (loc)
(setf (locf loc) 3))
then
> (foo)
3
locative creates a locative to a place.
locf retrieves the value of the place referenced by a locative.
(setf locf) updates the value of the place referenced by a locative.
with-locatives wraps some symbol macros around locatives to make them look like variables.
As an example of with-locatives, bar above could be written as:
(defun bar (loc)
(with-locatives ((l loc))
(setf l 3)))
or, if you don’t want a new name for the locative:
(defun bar (loc)
(with-locatives (loc)
(setf loc 3)))
Locatives are, of course, implemented by functions which capture the appropriate lexical scope where they are created. They have indefinite extent as you would expect, although they’re most often useful.
locatives lives in org.tfeb.toys.locatives and provides org.tfeb.toys.locatives. It will probably end up in my hax repo.
Python has a syntax which allows you to ‘decorate’ definitions:
@f1(arg)
@f2
def foo (x):
return x
is equivalent to
def foo (x):
return x
foo = f1(arg)(f2(foo))
(Note that Python is a Lisp-1, so this makes sense.)
decorators lets you do this, but it is in fact far more general: it lets you rewrite things in completely arbitrary ways. So, for instance, here is how you might define a traced decorator:
(define-decorator-dispatcher traced (fdef &key options &allow-other-keys)
(destructuring-match options
((&key (to '*trace-output*)
(when 't))
(destructuring-match fdef
((defun name arglist &body doc/decls/forms)
(:when (eq defun 'defun))
(multiple-value-bind (doc decls forms) (parse-docstring-body doc/decls/forms)
(let ((<when> (make-symbol "WHEN"))
(<s> (make-symbol "S")))
`(defun ,name ,arglist
,@(if doc (list doc))
,@decls
(let ((,<when> ,when)
(,<s> ,to))
(when ,<when>
(format ,<s> "[~S" ',name))
(multiple-value-prog1
(progn
,@forms)
(when ,<when>
(format ,<s> "]~%" ',name))))))))
(otherwise
(decorator-error "not a function definition: ~S" fdef))))
(otherwise
(decorator-error "unexpected options for traced ~S" options))))
And now
(defvar *traced* nil)
#@(traced :when *traced*)
(defun foo (x)
x)
is expanded to
(defun foo (x)
(let ((#:when *tracing*) (#:s *trace-output*))
(when #:when (format #:s "[~S" 'foo))
(multiple-value-prog1
(progn x)
(when #:when (format #:s "]~%" 'foo)))))
make-decorator-readtable constructs a readtable with a dispatch macro, by default for @, for decorators. Note that @ will clash with read-package in my hax.
define-decorator-dispatcher defines a decorator dispatcher. Dispatchers take one mandatory argument which is the form they are decorating, and several keyword arguments:
pre is the current list of forms to be evaluated before the decorated form;post is the current list of forms to be evaluated after the decorated form;options is any options to the decorator – in syntax like #@(traced . options) <form> it is the options, while in a form like #@traced <form> it is the empty list;prefix is the prefix argument to the dispatch macro.Decorator dispatchers return one, two or three values:
decorator-error is both the condition type of errors signalled by decorators and a function which will signal such an error taking a format string and format arguments.
There are predefined decorators called inline and notinline.
As well as decorators defined with define-decorator-dispatcher you can simply define functions which will be called. The reason for define-decorator-dispatcher is just so that inline &c can work.
In general a decorated form ends up expanding to
(progn
<pre-form>
...
<rewritten-form>
<post-form>
...)
This is done so things work at the top level (in particular I did not want anything which ended up being (let ((v (defun ...))) ... v), but it means that anything which adds post forms needs to be aware that the value of the form will be lost.
decorators will probably stop being a toy soon.
decorators lives in and provides :org.tfeb.toys.decorators.
case for regular expressions regex-caseregex-case defines a case-like construct for regular expressions, building on CL-PPCRE. Here is a simple aexample
(regex-case line
("^\\s+;" ())
((:sequence
:start-anchor
(:greedy-repetition 1 nil :whitespace-char-class)
(:register (:greedy-repetition 0 nil :everything))
(:greedy-repetition 0 nil :whitespace-char-class)
:end-anchor)
(:registers (content))
content)
(otherwise ()
(error "what even is ~S" line))))
The regular expressions are literals and are compiled with create-scanner once only. Each clause may then specify what parts of the match it is interested in by its second argument, which specifies which bits of the match, if any, you are interested in:
:match <v> binds the whole match to <v>;:match-start <v> binds <v> to the start position of the whole match;:match-end <v> does the same for the end position;:registers (<v> ...) binds one or more register substrings to variables. If a <v> is given either as nil or a symbol whose name is _ then no binding is made for that register;:register-starts <v> binds <v> to an array or register start positions;:register-ends <v> does the same for the register end positions.As an example, if you are interested in the second register, you could get it like this:
(regex-case line
(("^fog(gy)?\\s*(.*)$" (:registers (_ word))
... word ...))
...)
Here the _ says ‘not interested in this’.
There is a default case which must be last:
(regex-case v
...
(otherwise ()
...))
You can use t as well. The default case can’t bind any variables: the () is there just for consistency with other cases.
regex-case compiles the regular expressions in a load-time-value form: that means that the various parameters which control create-scanner matter at that point: you can’t set them later and expect them to do anything.
I am not at all sure about the variable-binding syntax: that might change if I can think of anything nicer.
regex-case lives in and provides :org.tfeb.toys.regex-case.
enumerations[Largely written by Zyni.] In C and other primitive languages, enumerations are a way of defining a small number of integer constants. This is only needed because these languages don’t have symbols.
But you might need to interact with C programs, and so, for fun, we wrote this. It works in the obvious way by defining a number of constants whose values are integers. By ensuring that the constants are defined at compile time, and stashing information about the definition, enumeration-case expands into comparisons with literal integers.
Enumerations can also be extended from ‘base’ enumerations in a fairly obvious way.
The documentation here is incomplete, as are the docstrings for the macros.
define-enumeration defines an enumeration:
(define-enumeration monster
small
big
tentacled)
defines, for instance, monster.small as 0 and so on. You can control the separator, value for the constants and other things.
A type is defined in terms of member.
enumeration-case is a case construct for enumerations.
(enumeration-case m
(monster.small ...)
(... ...)
(otherwise ...))
The constants are turned into literal integers at macroexpansion time. You can also specify that the case must be over a particular enumeration:
(enumeration-case (m :of monster)
((small big) 'fight)
(tentacled 'run))
In this case you can use the short names since the macro knows what to look up.
enumerations will never be more than a toy, I am sure: any real C FLI presumably provides better options.
(define-enumeration monster
small
big
tentacled)
(define-enumeration (interesting-monster :base monster)
furry
edible)
(defun react (m)
(declare (type interesting-monster m))
(enumeration-case (m :of interesting-monster)
((small big) 'walk-away)
(tentacled 'run-away)
(furry 'stroke)
(edible 'eat)
(otherwise
(error "what is this?"))))
And now
> (react monster.small)
walk-away
> (react interesting-monster.tentacled)
run-away
> (typep interesting-monster.edible 'interesting-monster)
t
> (typep interesting-monster.edible 'monster)
nil
> (typep interesting-monster.small 'monster)
t
enumerations lives in and provides org.tfeb.toys.enumerations .
fexAncient Lisps often had things called FEXPRs, or in Interlisp, NLAMBDAs: these were functions which got their arguments unevaluated. In the function body you would then explicitly call eval to evaluate the arguments you needed. FEXPRs were something people used before they really understood how macros should work: there is a lovely paper by Kent Pitman, Special forms in Lisp where he discusses the various options and comes down on the side of macros. This paper is worth reading both because it is well-written, but also because it demonstrates how confused the situation was in the 1970s and before.
It’s obvious that any literal version of FEXPRs is hopeless, and particularly so in a modern, lexically-scoped Lisp: evaluating arguments witheval means the arguments to them can’t be compiled at all, and eval does not know about lexical bindings in any case. Even in old Lisps it is unclear how something like (funcall 'my-fexpr-function ...) was meant to work (probably it never did work).
But things a bit like FEXPRs can potentially be useful to allow what is essentially normal-order evaluation in an applicative-order language. And macros, of course, can be used to implement something a bit like FEXPRs by turning arguments into promises. This is what fex does.
A promise is an object which wraps one or more expressions and will cause them to be evaluated when the promise is forced. A promise is just a wrapper around an anonymous function whose body is the expressions of course. Promises deal with lexical scope properly:
(force (let ((x 1)) (delay (+ x 2))))
works the way it should. As well as the things you’d normally expect a promise to do, promises keep their source forms: this has no use other than debugging and printing.
delay is a macro which turns one or more forms into a promise: (delay form ...) will return a promise which, when forced, will evaluate the forms and return their value5.
force will force a promise, evaluating its forms if need be. If the promise has already been forced it simply returns the same value as when it was first forced: promises memoize their value in other words6.
promisep tells you if something is a promise.
forcedp tells you if a promise has been forced.
promise-source-form is the source form of a promise: if delay has more than one argument it will be (progn ...).
ensure is a utility function: if its argument is a promise it will force it, otherwise it returns its argument. ensure is useful in cases where you do not know, and do not want to know, if an object is a promise.
ensuring is a macro which rebinds a list of variables to ensured versions of themselves. So (ensuring (x y) ...) is the same as (let ((x (ensure x)) (y (ensure y))) ...). It’s useful to make sure that you don’t force promises more often than you need to. ensuring in fact understands let-style bindings: (ensuring ((x y)) ...) will bind x to the result of ensuring y.
The obvious implementation of a fex is as a macro which suitably wraps delay forms around its arguments, and then calls the function corresponding to the fex with the resulting promises. This is fine if all you ever want is very simple argument lists for the fex, but it will break horribly for keyword arguments: a form like
(my-fex x :y (complicated-function ...))
will get turned into something like
(funcall (symbol-fex 'my-fex)
(delay x)
(delay :y)
(delay (complicated-function)))
This both means that keyword arguments won’t work and also that things end up getting turned into promises which really do not need to be.
So instead, fexes work a little bit more subtly: rather than blindly wrapping the arguments in delay, they only wrap arguments for which constantp is false in the macro environment. This means that keywords, for instance, get passed to the function as is, so keyword arguments will work. It also means that you can’t blindly assume that the function’s arguments are promises as they may not be. This is what ensure is for: you can safely ensure any argument, regardless of whether or not it is a promise.
define-fex defines a fex. This is the same as defun, although fex names must be symbols (so in particular you can’t define fexes for setf functions). Arguments which are not detectably constant are passed as promises: using ensure on any argument is safe. A fex only works as a fex when its name is the first element of a compound form, as fexes are implemented as macros which call the underlying function after wrapping arguments suitably. fexes are not functions, and are not fboundp.
fex-boundp will tell you if a symbol has a global fex definition.
symbol-fex is the accessor for the function of a fex.
flet/fex is flet for fexes. It works by using flet to bind a bunch of functions and then macrolet to bind suitable wrappers.
labels/fex is labels for fexes: it works by using macrolet to bind wrappers and then labels to bind suitable functions: because the function bodies are within the macrolet recursive calls work.
funcall/fex is like funcall but it delays its arguments.
A simple implementation of an if-like form is:
(define-fex fif (test then else)
(if (ensure test) (ensure then) (ensure else)))
You can call the symbol-fex of a symbol, and if it is careful to use ensure everywhere it should, things should just work.
funcall/fex is as far as you can easily go: you can’t write apply/fex without making much larger changes to the language. Somerhing like
(let ((l (list ...)))
(apply/fex f l))
can’t work unless list does not evaluate its arguments. This is the point where you start actually needing a normal-order language rather than a hack like this.
Promises should be thread-safe, assuming that slot access of structures is atomic. They may evaluate their forms more than once, but there should be not race between a promise being marked as forced and it actually being forced.
I have written a previous version of things like FEXPRs which I seem to have lost: it was, I think, more elaborate than this one, but probably not as good.
fex lives in and provides org.tfeb.toys.fex.
The TFEB.ORG Lisp toys are copyright 1990-2023 Tim Bradshaw. See LICENSE for the license.
However gather can now be used as (gather ... (for (x ...)) ...) for instance. ↩
Not quite, because it only really knows how to modify a (copy of) a readtable. ↩
I once had a much more elaborate system along these lines based around having looked at, I think, C++’s version of this sort of idea (or was it Java’s? I forget), and this system did force friendship relations to be bidirectional. I probably still have that code somewhere, and I might one day revive it. ↩
There was a previous fluids module. The name ‘fluid’ comes from Cambridge Lisp / Standard Lisp, although it might go back further than that. In those languages you would declare a variable ‘fluid’ which told the compiler that the full dynamic-binding semantics for it should be kept, even in compiled code. Of course for both those languages compiled code and interpreted code often had different semantics: I am pretty sure that all variables in interpreted code were implicitly fluid. ↩
If the forms return more than one value, all but the first is lost. ↩
Assuming assignment to structure fields is atomic then the memoization done by promises should be thread-safe: the forms in a promise may be evaluated more than once but there should never be confusion about whether or not they have been evaluated. What I’ve assumed is that, if a promise had two fields, then something like (setf (promise-value p) value (promise-forced-p p) t) might not be safe, because other threads might see the two assignments in the other order. So instead there is a single field which initially contains a cons of nil and the promise’s function, and into which force stores a new cons of t and the computed value. I think this is safe on the assumption that assignment to structure fields is atomic. ↩