Hayley Patton no-defun-allowed

Don’t Build Your Own Lisp

I feel somewhat pressed to give a negative review of this book. This comes from someone who has worked on various Lisp implementations, and written some amount of C, but that isn’t an excuse to be overly harsh. This book, however, does not provide many nice things to say, and plenty of un-nice things. My apologies in advance.

First off: God help you if you are going to write your first interpreter in C of all things. No one I know thinks it’s a good idea to start

The results

Note that only the C "control" example has type information; every other implementation either uses inference or generic arithmetic.

Implementation	Language	Time (ms)	Time rel. C	Arithmetic	Compilation model
GCC	C	20.3	1	mod 2^n	AOT
SBCL	Common Lisp	36.4	1.79	bignum	AOT
SpiderMonkey	JavaScript	56.0	2.75	float	JIT
Chez	Scheme	93.7	4.62	bignum	AOT

Selling Lisp by the Pound

“Paper late!” cried a voice in the crowd,

“Old man dies!” The note he left was signed,

‘Old Kiczales’ - it seems he’s drowned!

	-------------------------- MODULE sicl_rack_update --------------------------
	EXTENDS Naturals, TLC

	(* --algorithm basic
	variables object = <<0, 0>>;

	process ChangeClass \in 1..4
	variables oldclass = 0, oldrack = 0;
	begin
	LoadClass:

	(defun char- (character offset)
	(- (char-code character) offset))

	(defconstant +encode-shift-lut+
	(sse:setr-pi8
	(char- #\a 26) #1=(char- #\0 52) #1# #1# #1# #1#
	#1# #1# #1# #1# #1# (char- #\+ 62)
	(char- #\/ 63) (char-code #\A) 0 0))

	(declaim (inline encode-lookup))

	(defclass point ()
	((x :initarg :x
	:reader x
	:type single-float
	:pool-name point-xs)
	(y :initarg :y
	:reader y
	:type single-float
	:pool-name point-ys))
	(:metaclass pooled-class))

	(defpackage cas-word
	(:use :cl)
	(:export #:word-ref #:run-tests))

	(in-package :sb-vm)

	(sb-c:defknown cas-word::%cas-word
	((simple-array (unsigned-byte 64) 1) fixnum (unsigned-byte 64) (unsigned-byte 64))
	(unsigned-byte 64)
	()

	#!/bin/bash

	PROJECTS=${1:-~/quicklisp/local-projects}

	clone() {
	TARGET=$PROJECTS/$(basename $1)
	if [[ -d $TARGET ]]; then
	(cd $TARGET; git pull)
	else
	git clone $1 $TARGET

	(declaim (optimize (speed 3) (safety 1)))
	(defconstant +pearl-probability+ (float 20/423))

	(declaim (inline trade))
	(defun trade ()
	(if (< (random 1.0) +pearl-probability+)
	;; Note that RANDOM returns a value in [0, maximum), i.e.
	;; it will only produce numbers below the maximum given.
	(+ 4 (random 5))
	0))

	(ql:quickload :the-cost-of-nothing)
	(in-package :cl-user)
	(defun foo (x)
	(declare (integer x)
	(optimize (speed 3)))
	(< (- (expt 2 256)) x (expt 2 256)))
	(the-cost-of-nothing:bench (foo 7))

	(in-package :sb-c)