2014-12-19

LOOP quiz

  1. Does (loop for i below 10 finally (return i)) return 9 or 10?
     
  2. Does (loop for i upto 10 finally (return i)) return 10 or 11?
     
  3. What does (loop for i below 10 for j upto 10 finally (return (list i j))) return?
     
  4. What about (loop for i below 10 and j upto 10 finally (return (list i j)))?

I stumbled upon the semantics of this last example in a recent bugfix and thought it was worth sharing. (Reminded me of the joke about what's hard in CS, too.)

Turns out LOOP's FOR ... AND not only mimics LET (rather than LET*) in terms of binding visibility, it also influences when the loop termination checks take place. That was new to me. I initially expected examples 3 and 4 to return the same values. What about you? Which ones, if any, did you get wrong? :-)

P.S.: LOOP for Black Belts is my favorite LOOP tutorial.

2014-12-11

paredit

Taylor Campbell's paredit is one of those Emacs extensions that I can't live without. In a nutshell, it forces you to deal with Lisp code exclusively via operations that don't introduce unbalanced parenthesis (or other similar violations of structure). The genius about this approach is that it completely eliminates the step of making sure parentheses are properly balanced after you write or edit a piece of code. After you get used to paredit, performing — or even watching — manual parenthesis balancing becomes painful.

Recently, I've come across these two introductions to paredit:

  1. Emacs Rocks! Episode 14: Paredit
  2. The Animated Guide to Paredit
So, if you're still not using paredit, have a look at those and give it a try. At first you might feel like the karate kid doing frustrating chores — you can always take a break with M-x paredit-mode — but I promise it'll soon pay off!

2014-12-01

SLIME officially available via MELPA

SLIME has been available from MELPA for a while, but only recently did we iron out some annoying bugs. Notably, upgrading the SLIME package no longer results in confusion about where SWANK is.

So, as of SLIME 2.11, once you have the melpa (or melpa stable) repository set up, installing and updating SLIME from within Emacs is pretty easy:

    M-x package-install RET slime RET
Enjoy!

Update: Oh, if you want to switch to MELPA, make sure you remove your old SLIME location from Emacs's load-path, otherwise the old version will take precedence.

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