I am currently working my way through Graham's On Lisp and find this particular bit difficult to understand: Binding. Lexical variables must appear directly in the source code. The first argume...

Goal I would like to have my Common Lisp (SBCL + GNU Emacs + Slime) environment be sort of like a Smalltalk image in that I want to have a big ball of mud of all my code organized in packages and ...

I am reading Hackers and Painters and am confused by a problem mentioned by the author to illustrate the power of different programming languages. The problem is: We want to write a function th...

I need to generate a space-padded string with a variable string length. The not-so-clever solution that works involved nesting of format: (format nil (format nil "~~~d,,a" 10) "asdf") Now, I wan...

I am not satisfied to find files matching a string like this: (remove-if-not (lambda (it) (search "wildcard" (namestring it))) (uiop:directory-files "./")) ;; I'll ignore case with str:contains?...

Recently, I have come across the so-called hash-dot Common Lisp reader macro and am wondering how it works and what it does. Using search engines was not of much help, so any examples, explanations...

I'm using OpenMCL on Darwin, and I'd like to do something like: (loop for f in (directory "somedir") collect (some-per-file-processing f)) But I can't get directory to return anything other tha...

I have this association-list in Common Lisp: (defvar base-list (list (cons 'a 0) (cons 2 'c))) I have to call assoc when my argument is of type string. For the pair (A . 0) I have to convert "a...

Is there a way I can get SBCL to take the value of a CPU register at a certain point in my program and print it as an integer? Would I have to use gdb?

I am researching programming language design, and I am interested in the question of how to replace the popular single-dispatch message-passing OO paradigm with the multimethods generic-function pa...

How do I detect if a lexical variable is bound in a scope? I basically want boundp for lexical variables. Concretely, say I have: (defvar *dynamic* 1) (defconstant +constant+ 2) (let ((lexical 3...

I am wondering how one goes about deploying a Common Lisp web application written in, say, Hunchentoot, Wookie, Woo, or even Clack. That is, suppose I write an app that contains some files, packag...

I am looking for a way to output a character a number of times using format. Is this possible? Can someone fill in the _?_'s, so that the example works? (let ((n 3)) (format nil "_?_" _?_ #\* _?_...

The split-list function takes a list and returns a list of two lists consisting of alternating elements of the input. I wrote the following: (defun split-list (L) (cond ((endp L) (list NIL NIL))...

In trying to gather a deeper familiarity with Common Lisp's tools, I found myself struggling when reading the documentation. Namely, it is difficult to comprehend what the usage of the macro in que...

How do I build a standalone executable in SBCL? I've tried ; SLIME 2.20 CL-USER> (defun hullo () (format t "hullo")) HULLO CL-USER> (sb-ext:save-lisp-and-die "hullo" :toplevel #'hullo :exec...

In Python we have the del statement for deleting variables. E.g: a = 1 del a What the equivalent of this in Lisp? (setq foo 1) ;; (del foo) ?

I use paredit on emacs with SLIME's repl. This means that at any point during my typing on the repl, my s-expressions are balanced. However, they may not be complete, and I might want to continue...

I'm programming on Ubuntu using GCL. From the documentation on Common Lisp from various sources, I understand that let creates local variables, and setq sets the values of existing variables. In ca...

While reading Peter Seibel's "Practical Common Lisp", I learned that aside from the core parts of the language like list processing and evaluating, there are macros like loop, do, etc that were wri...

Several months ago, I was inspired by the magnificent book ANSI Common Lisp written by Paul Graham, and the statement that Lisp could be used as a secret weapon in your web development, published b...

How do I start Hunchentoot on a project? I looked over Edi Weitz's guide and everything went smoothly until after installation. The listed tutorials were either broken or skimmed over actual server...

I realize there are many places I can ask this question at but I thought I'd try here. I've already seemingly attained as much help as I can from the good people at Maxima. I run Maxima with SBCL ...

Is there a mocking/stubbing framework for Common Lisp? EmacsLispMock looks great, but it is an Emacs lisp framework, and I'm looking for something to use from Common Lisp. Any suggestions?

Is there a way to have quicklisp load a library without sending: To load "drakma": Load 1 ASDF system: drakma ; Loading "drakma" To standard out? I've tried adding :verbose nil and :explain ni...