Helping HEΛP Again!

In a flurry of ... free time, I also went back to HEΛP and fixed a few bugs that were exposed by some of the things I did with CLAST. Recording the documentation strings from the pesky

  (setf (documentation 'foo 'function) "Foo Fun!")
  

are now all working as expected, at least at top-level and within PROGN-like constructs, e.g., EVAL-WHEN.

Meanwhile, I also updated the documentation and the web page adding a few caveats about how to run the DOCUMENT function, and how to work around issues I have seen in my (not so) extensive tests.

Of course, I put my money where my mouth is: the HEΛP documentation web pages are built with HEΛP.

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(cheers)

CLAST reworked

Prompted by a post on one of the various Common Lisp fora, I finally got my act together and went back to CLAST, i.e., the Common Lisp Abstract Syntax Tree library that I had in the works for ... some time.

The library has an interesting origin, which I will recount in a different post. Suffice to say that eventually I needed a code walker which did a few complicated things. NIH sydrome immediately kicked in.

The main think I needed were functions inspecting code, as in the example below.

cl-prompt> (clast:find-free-variables '(let ((x 42)) (+ x y)))
(Y)

To achieve this (apparently) simple goal, a (mostly) portable environment library had to be developed and a full set of AST node structures had to be provided.

The result is now finally ready for prime time. In Lispworks you can also see how things actually get parsed. As an example, the picture below shows the result of the following command.

cl-prompt> (clast:parse '(loop for i in '(1 2 3)
                               count (oddp (+ qd i)) into odds))
#<LOOP-FORM  24ECE77F>
NIL

Please try it, report bugs, blast my design choices and suggest improvements.

Thank you

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(cheers)