Category Archives: Programming

Safety And The Lisp Read Function

Posted on 2012-01-17 by jcs

For all my blathering about security, here’s a potential exploit in Common Lisp that I never thought about. William Halliburton has a nice explanation of Lisp’s read function and the assoicated read-macro #.. When read sees the sequence #. it … Continue reading →

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The Popularity Of Programming Languages

Posted on 2012-01-14 by jcs

TIOBE Software has published its list of programming language popularity for January 2012 and awarded Objective-C the TIOBE Programming Language Award for 2011. The award is given for the language with the most growth in market share for the year. … Continue reading →

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Common Lisp Pitfalls

Posted on 2012-01-12 by jcs

Here is a list of Common Lisp pitfalls compiled by Jeff Dalton. They were originally posted to comp.lang.lisp in 1995. If, like me, you’re a Lisp programmer but you don’t write in Common Lisp everyday, it’s probably a good idea … Continue reading →

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Writing Log Files In JSON

Posted on 2012-01-11 by jcs

Readers of my series on writing log files as Lisp code (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7) may enjoy Paul Querna’s post over at Paul’s Journal entitled Write Logs for Machines, use JSON. In it he says that it’s … Continue reading →

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Lexical Scoping In Emacs Lisp

Posted on 2012-01-10 by jcs

I’ve said before that Emacs Lisp is pretty much like other Lisps but one area where that is not true is in variable scoping. Common Lisp and Scheme both enjoy lexical scoping whereas Emacs Lisp has dynamic scoping. Until you … Continue reading →

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A Puzzle

Posted on 2012-01-09 by jcs

After stumbling onto Justin Heyes-Jones’ compile-command tip that I wrote about previously, I decided to trawl through JustinHJ’s Coding Blog to see what other goodies I could find. One interesting post, Word numbers programming puzzle, discusses one of the ITA … Continue reading →

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Free Programming eBooks

Posted on 2012-01-06 by jcs

Michael Kohl over at citizen428.blog() has a nice list of free programming ebooks. Many of these are for Lisp—including Emacs Lisp—but there’s a nice selection of other languages including Ruby, Javascript, Haskell, and many others. There are also books on … Continue reading →

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File Loading In Emacs

Posted on 2012-01-04 by jcs

Xah Lee has a very nice post up that explores Emacs Lisp’s Library System and what require, load, load-file, autoload, and feature really do and how they differ. This is one of those subject areas that most of us just … Continue reading →

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The Emacs compile-command Local Variable

Posted on 2012-01-02 by jcs

I just ran across this gem in an old Justinhj’s Coding Blog post. Most of the time developers are working on projects that are complex enough to require a make file and for them, Emacs does the right thing when … Continue reading →

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Emacs Syntax Classes

Posted on 2011-12-31 by jcs

This is sort of a note to myself. I sometimes need to know the character designation of a syntax class. Most often this is for use with the \sC syntax in a regexp. For example (looking-at “^\\s-*$\\|\\s-*;”) asks if we’re … Continue reading →

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