chaitanyagupta

Reader Macros in Common Lisp

This post also appears on lisper.in.

Reader macros are perhaps not as famous as ordinary macros. While macros are a great way to create your own DSL, reader macros provide even greater flexibility by allowing you to create entirely new syntax on top of Lisp.

Paul Graham explains them very well in [On Lisp][] (Chapter 17, Read-Macros):

The three big moments in a Lisp expression's life are read-time, compile-time, and runtime. Functions are in control at runtime. Macros give us a chance to perform transformations on programs at compile-time. ...read-macros... do their work at read-time.

pascalpoitras

This configuration is not maintained anymore. You should think twice before using it, Breaking change and security issue will likely eventually happens as any abandonned project.

sebfisch

Delimited Continuations

Delimited continuations manipulate the control flow of programs. Similar to control structures like conditionals or loops they allow to deviate from a sequential flow of control.

We use exception handling as another example for control flow manipulation and later show how to implement it using delimited continuations. Finally, we show that nondeterminism can also be expressed using delimited continuations.

Exception Handling

jdp

#!/usr/bin/env python

import sys
import types
import operator

class Runtime:
    def __init__(self, env={}, stack=[]):
        self.env = {
            # Primitive words, not an impressive base but it works