Land Of Lisp chapter 7 - Using SBCL

http://blog.ciaranbradley.com/land-of-lisp-chapter-7-using-sbcl

by ciaranbradley • 16 years ago

24 14 16 years ago

blog.ciaranbradley.com

I bought the book the other day after it was posted here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1836935 and have been working through the chapters. The book contains some CLISP specific code but I'm running SBCL. So this is my SBCL hack for the first stumbling block I found.

disclaimer: I'm a LISP noob, so this is a beginners hack, but it may help others (like me) who have had difficulty installing CLISP.

mahmud4• 16 years ago

Instead of using implementation dependent functions, use a library like trivial-shell, which is also available via QuickLisp. It has the SHELL-COMMAND function you need.

http://common-lisp.net/project/trivial-shell/

ciaranbradley3• 16 years ago

Cheers, I thought there might be something that was QL installable but didn't want to get sidetracked from the task at hand. I'll have a play with that in the morning :)

mahmud4• 16 years ago

Enjoy yourself!

Of course, you're more than welcome to shoot me an email if you ever get stuck.

Here is a far more forgiving reference to Common Lisp than the Hyperspec, though don't let the fancy TeX typesetting intimidate you.

http://clqr.berlios.de/clqr-a4-consec.pdf

In addition to that, I think you should dump yourself a nice image with ASDF and QL builtin, so you don't have to load them every time.

mahmud4• 16 years ago

Also, you might find this slow little utility for converting a bunch of stuff into strings. It will do the job nicely, and it accepts every Lisp type.

  (defun str (&rest strings)
    (apply 'concatenate 'string
  	 (loop for x in strings 
               collecting (format nil "~a" x))))

You can use it like this:

  (shell (str "dot -Tpng -O " fname))

You might also find that WITH-OPEN-FILE arguments can get a little unwieldy to type in the repl, specially if you want to overwrite files, so you can use this WITH-TEXT-FILE macro. For binary files you will just need to add (:element-type '(unsigned-byte 8))

  (defmacro with-text-file ((stream path) &body body)
    `(with-open-file (,stream ,path
   			    :direction :io
			    :if-exists :supersede
			    :if-does-not-exist :create)
       ,@body))

ScottBurson• 16 years ago

How about simply this?

  (defun str (&rest strings)
    (format nil "~{~A~}" strings))

flavoie• 16 years ago

A page dedicated to landoflisp on sbcl would great. clisp looks like more trouble to install on my mac than the sbcl package.

melling• 16 years ago

I hope someone does a Clojure page too.

KC8ZKF• 16 years ago

You should look at the Rudix package of Clisp.

http://rudix.org/packages-abc.html#clisp

gibsonf12• 16 years ago

Here's a function to create svg (default) or jpg for both sbcl and lispworks from graphviz:

(defun make-svg (file-name &key jpg)

    #+lispworks (sys:call-system-showing-output
                 (string+ cl-user::*organontech-graphviz* (if jpg " -Tjpg " " -Tsvg ")
                          cl-user::*fcgaa-lean-mapping-path*
                          "/" file-name ".dot"
                          " -o "
                          cl-user::*fcgaa-lean-mapping-path*
                          "/" file-name (if jpg ".jpg" ".svg")))
    #+sbcl (sb-ext:run-program cl-user::*organontech-graphviz*
                                 (list (if jpg "-Tjpg" "-Tsvg")
                                       (string+ cl-user::*fcgaa-lean-mapping-path* "/" file-name ".dot")
                                       "-o"
                                       (string+ cl-user::*fcgaa-lean-mapping-path* "/" file-name (if jpg ".jpg" ".svg")))
                                 :output (weblog-stream)
                                 )
    )

(defun weblog-stream ()

  (or (net.aserve:vhost-log-stream (net.aserve:wserver-default-vhost net.aserve:*wserver*))
      t)) ;;sends output directly to html stream on portable allegroserve

(defmacro string+ (string &rest strings) `(concatenate 'string ,string ,@strings))

waterhouse• 16 years ago

I use this. This makes the "shell" command work in SBCL, and does nothing in CLISP or any other implementation.

  #+sbcl
  (defun shell (x)
    (run-program "/bin/sh" (list "-c" x) :output t))

Tell me if you want it to work in an implementation other than CLISP or SBCL, and if I can install it on my computer, then I'll figure it out.

Land Of Lisp chapter 7 - Using SBCL

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