Category Archives: Programming

Living the Lisp Machine Environment

Posted on 2013-01-29 by jcs

A little while ago I wrote about Martin Fowler’s post on InternalReprogrammability that celebrated Emacs reprogrammability and its recapitulation of the Lisp Machine environment. That capability is of more than theoretical importance as I, once again, discovered. Long time readers … Continue reading →

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A Xah Lee Challenge

Posted on 2013-01-24 by jcs

Over at ergoemacs.org, Xah Lee posses the following challenge: Find a simple and general method to create the following text. (global-set-key (kbd “<menu> g a”) “A”) (global-set-key (kbd “<menu> g b”) “B”) (global-set-key (kbd “<menu> g c”) “C”) (global-set-key (kbd … Continue reading →

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SBCL 1.1.3

Posted on 2013-01-05 by jcs

The fine folks at SBCL.org have released version 1.1.3 of their Common Lisp system. One of the contributed packages (SB-SPROF) failed a test on my MacBook Pro but worked fine on my iMac. It looks like a VM problem when … Continue reading →

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Symbols in Emacs Lisp

Posted on 2012-12-30 by jcs

One of the hardest things for Lisp newcomers to understand is symbols. They look tantalizingly like variables from other languages and, indeed, they are often just that. But, as the new Lisper soon discovers, they are much more. Xah Lee … Continue reading →

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C++

Posted on 2012-12-29 by jcs

The funniest—or is it saddest—thing I’ve read about C++ in a long time.

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Lispdoc

Posted on 2012-12-25 by jcs

The other day I wrote about discovering Steve Purcell’s emacs.d repository on GitHub. Today, I want to talk about another wonderful thing I discovered there: Lispdoc. Bill Moorier’s Lispdoc is a documentation search engine for Common Lisp that searches The … Continue reading →

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Naming Registers

Posted on 2012-12-24 by jcs

Magnar Sveen has another great post on What the .emacs.d!?. This time it’s a nice hack to make magit run in the full frame and then restore the window configuration that existed when magit was invoked. I’ve been annoyed several … Continue reading →

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SBCL 1.1.2 Is Released

Posted on 2012-12-02 by jcs

Christophe Rhodes is announcing that he has released Steel Banks Common Lisp 1.1.2. You can get the release at the SBCL Download Page. As always, installation is simple. I did my usual dance of sh make.sh cd test sh run-tests.sh … Continue reading →

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C++ Craziness

Posted on 2012-12-01 by jcs

If someone asked you to write a C++ program to output the squares of the numbers from 0 to 9, what would it look like? Vivek Haldar, whose work I’ve cited approvingly several times (1, 2, 3), has an answer. … Continue reading →

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Mawking AWK with Lisp

Posted on 2012-11-29 by jcs

Back in 2009, Brendan O’Connor over at AI and Social Science posted an article entitled Don’t MAWK AWK—the fastest and most elegant big data munging language! He recently posted an update that caused the original article to pop up on … Continue reading →

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