20210316

Need more HEΛP?

Just a quick note for people following these... parentheses.

I have carved out some time to do some more Lisp hacking and this lead me to look at the very nice usocket library (I want to do some network programming).  The usocket library documentation page has a bit of an "old" and "handcrafted" look and feel to it, so I tried to produce a version of the documentation with help from my HEΛP library.

Well, it turns out that usocket has some more than legitimate code within it that my HEΛP library was not handling; even worse, it unearthed a bug in the Lambda List parsing routines.

As an example, usocket uses the following idiom to set some of the documentation strings.

    (setf (documentation 'fun 'function) "Ain't this fun?") 

This is perfectly fine, but it needed some extra twist to get HEΛP do what is, IMHO, the right thing: in this case it meant ensuring that the lambda list of the function was properly rendered in the final documentation.

Apart from that, a few not so nice buglets were exposed in the code parsing lambda lists.  The result is that now the logic of that piece of code is simpler and somewhat cleaner.

So, if you want to get HEΛP to document your Common Lisp code, give it a spin.



(cheers)

4 comments:

  1. Programming is just one of my hobbies, but I wanted to state that I really like your library - and especially the name you found for it. Great work!

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    Replies
    1. Thank you Christian. I guess being around Greeks (my wife and daughter) is a source of inspiration :) :)

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