Author Archives: jcs

Common Lisp FAQ

Posted on 2012-04-06 by jcs

Nikodemus Siivola has updated his Common Lisp FAQ. It’s a nice resource for new Lispers and well worth a read. You might also want to check out his home page; he’s got links to many of his projects and some … Continue reading →

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Dired Jump

Posted on 2012-04-05 by jcs

I got a great tip today from the ErgoEmacs G+ Page: dired-jump. It’s bound to 【Ctrl+x Ctrl+j】 so it’s easy to call. What it does is jump to the dired buffer corresponding to the current buffer and move the point … Continue reading →

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Slicing Words With Elisp

Posted on 2012-04-04 by jcs

I was playing around with another ITA hiring puzzle today and needed to “slice” a sequence of words. That is, I wanted to form a list of strings consisting of the first letters of each word, the second letters of … Continue reading →

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Solution To The Add-A-Gram Challenge

Posted on 2012-04-03 by jcs

Last week, I issued a challenge to solve the Add-A-Gram puzzle using Emacs and Elisp. The puzzle statement is here. This is an interesting problem that’s easy to get wrong.The solution seems straightforward: Start with a 3-letter word (car, say). … Continue reading →

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Two From Garret

Posted on 2012-04-02 by jcs

I was trawling through Ron Garret’s site (see yesterday’s post) and came upon two excellent short papers. The first, The Idiot’s Guide to Special Variables discusses the difference between lexical and special (or dynamic) variables. The second, The Idiot’s Guide … Continue reading →

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Lisp At JPL

Posted on 2012-04-01 by jcs

A long time ago, I read and enjoyed Ron Garret’s story of using Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Now, he retells the story in a Google Talk that is well worth watching. Part of the story explains how they … Continue reading →

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Clozure Common Lisp 1.8

Posted on 2012-03-31 by jcs

I took advantage of the weekend to upgrade my machines to Clozure CL 1.8. As usual, installation was a snap. Just get the distribution with SVN: svn co http://svn.clozure.com/publicsvn/openmcl/release/1.8/darwinx86/ccl for Mac OS X and then ccl64 -n ? (ccl:rebuild-ccl :full … Continue reading →

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Elisp Challenge No. 2

Posted on 2012-03-30 by jcs

The other day, I found a reference to the Add-A-Gram puzzle, which is one of the retired challenges from ITA Software for prospective employees. Today’s challenge is to solve the Add-A-Gram puzzle with Emacs/Elisp. I’ll give a solution next week.

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Weitz On Macros

Posted on 2012-03-28 by jcs

Edi Weitz has a very nice set of notes on The Power of Lisp Macros. They’re from a talk he gave at freiheit.com and are aimed at the beginning Lisper. They’re amazingly easy to follow even though you aren’t hearing … Continue reading →

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Org Mode And Living Documents

Posted on 2012-03-27 by jcs

Vsevolod Dyomkin over at Lisp, The Universe and Everything has another in his series of interviews with Lisp hackers. This time it’s with Christophe Rhodes, the principal maintainer of SBCL. It’s an interesting interview and well worth a read so … Continue reading →

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