looking for Lisp gems

[Tamas K Papp]

I have just finished reading Coders at Work. Probably it will take
more readings to digest all the wisdom in there, but it has already
started to shape my thinking.

A particular piece of advice that occurs is that one should read and
understand high-quality code from other people. I would like to start
doing that with Common Lisp, and I am looking for "lisp gems": pieces
of code, or even whole libraries, which would be educational.

I would appreciate any suggestions, especially mentions of code that gave
people "Aha!" moments. I am not only interested in small, self-contained
snippets of code, but also in larger examples that made you think "Wow,
the author of this code leveraged the power of Lisp to keep the
complexity manageable in an exemplary way".

Thanks,

Tamas

[Zach Beane]

The example that always springs to my mind for questions like this is
CL-PPCRE. These qualities helped me learn a lot from it:

- it does an interesting and useful job, and is something that I will
actually use frequently

- it has interesting subtasks (parsing regular expressions, generating
matching code)

- it is fast

- it uses a wide variety of useful CL features: conditions, CLOS,
compiler macros, etc

- it uses an interesting strategy (compiling to chains of closures
without using COMPILE)

- it is somewhat short, though pretty dense

Although other systems have some combination of these qualities, I think
CL-PPCRE is great for combining all of them in one place.

Zach

[William James]

Tamas K Papp wrote:

> A particular piece of advice that occurs is that one should read and
> understand high-quality code from other people. I would like to start
> doing that with Common Lisp,

Did I read that correctly? You're looking for high-quality code
in COBOL LISP?

"Over the Mountains
Of the Moon,
Down the Valley of the Shadow,
Ride, boldly ride,"
The shade replied, —
"If you seek for Eldorado!"

--

[Nicolas Neuss]

Tamas K Papp <tkp...@gmail.com> writes:

> I would appreciate any suggestions, especially mentions of code that gave
> people "Aha!" moments. I am not only interested in small, self-contained
> snippets of code, but also in larger examples that made you think "Wow,
> the author of this code leveraged the power of Lisp to keep the
> complexity manageable in an exemplary way".

The AMOP book and Norvig's "AI Programming in CL" contain beautiful code
(IMO).

Nicolas

[Tim Bradshaw]

On 2010-01-04 17:59:00 +0000, "William James" <w_a_...@yahoo.com> said:

> Did I read that correctly? You're looking for high-quality code
> in COBOL LISP?

Remind me which cult do you belong to? I remember your name, but I
forget the details of your heresy. Fairly safe bet we can just burn
you though, I guess.