Category Archives: Programming

Lexical Binding in Emacs Video

Posted on 2013-05-07 by jcs

If you’re still confused about the difference between dynamic and lexical scoping in Emacs, Nic Ferrier has an excellent video that explains it with a couple of simple examples. You may find it useful to review the meaning of closure … Continue reading →

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Complexity Cheat Sheet

Posted on 2013-05-05 by jcs

Eric Rowell and Nick Dizazzo have posted a great Big-O cheat sheet. The sheet gives time and space complexity for several popular algorithms such as searching, sorting, and manipulation of data structures and graphs. One feature that I like is … Continue reading →

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A Summary of New Libraries in April’s Quicklisp

Posted on 2013-05-03 by jcs

Ben Hyde has produced a summary of the new libraries in April’s Quicklisp distribution. Each item has a link to the library’s README so it’s easy to get a more detailed look at libraries that interest you. A very nice … Continue reading →

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SBCL 1.1.7 Released

Posted on 2013-05-01 by jcs

The folks at Steel Banks Common Lisp have released SBCL 1.1.7. As usual the build, test, and installation went without mishap. This month’s release is mainly bug fixes but also includes an enhancement to TRACE so that PRINT-ALL handles multiple-valued … Continue reading →

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Vi(m) and Lisp

Posted on 2013-04-29 by jcs

Those of you who have been around for a while know that I was a Vi(m) user for a long time. I switched to Emacs when I started doing most of my programming in Lisp and Scheme. My main reason … Continue reading →

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disaster.el

Posted on 2013-04-23 by jcs

This is great! It’s disaster.el, a really useful tool if you write in C/C++ and can grok assembly language. What is does is compile and disassemble the C/C++ code in the current buffer. In will even jump to the code … Continue reading →

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A O(n) Solution to the Last Elisp Challenge

Posted on 2013-04-22 by jcs

As I mentioned in the post, my An Elisp Challenge post was suggested by this Programming Praxis post. The next Programming Praxis post was a followup that discussed Booth’s Algorithm, which calculates how many left rotations a string must undergo … Continue reading →

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Tags with Emacs

Posted on 2013-04-19 by jcs

One of the oldest and most general code navigation tools is tags. The idea is that you generate a tags database for your code base and then use it to tell your editor where to find the definition of a … Continue reading →

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My Solution to the Elisp Challenge

Posted on 2013-04-16 by jcs

Here’s my solution to the recent Elisp challenge. It’s easy to be seduced by the notion of rotating one sequence to see if it’s equal to the other. That would work but the rotation is pretty expensive and the solution … Continue reading →

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An Elisp Challenge

Posted on 2013-04-11 by jcs

Here’s a simple Elisp challenge suggested by a problem from by ProgrammingPraxis. We call one string a cycle of another if one string can be transformed into the other by a rotation of the characters. Note that this means They … Continue reading →

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