Tuesday, July 08, 2008

Lisp snippets on a Tuesday night

The ICFP contest is coming up, and Lindsey Kuper and I have been building our Scheme muscles. I was looking for an implementation of hash tables (or just some quick way to do a map), and I ran across the SRFIs -- Scheme Requests for Implementation. It's a semi-standard library of useful stuff for Scheme, and it's bundled with recent PLT Schemes! You can just say: (require srfi/n) to load up the nth SRFI; they're numbered. Particularly, I've been playing with the extended libraries for lists, strings, and hash tables.

On the Common Lisp side of things; I just ran across the insanely useful describe, which prints out what the system knows about a given object -- if it's a function with a docstring, the docstring will be in there. Also potentially useful: disassemble. Give it a function; it does what it sounds like!