lisp-interface-library

LIL: abstract interfaces and concrete data structures in Common Lisp

• Home Page: http://github.com/fare/lisp-interface-library/

• We wrote an article explaining about our library for ILC'2012: http://github.com/fare/lil-ilc2012/

• A PDF of a slightly corrected version of the article is here: http://common-lisp.net/~frideau/lil-ilc2012/lil-ilc2012.pdf

• An HTML of that version of the article is here: http://common-lisp.net/~frideau/lil-ilc2012/lil-ilc2012.html

• A short introduction on our "Interface-Passing Style" of programming, is also at: http://fare.livejournal.com/155094.html

• Manual: I have never worked on a manual, nor on a tutorial. For a quick introduction to how things work, look at the tests in test/ for a few examples. Then docstrings and source code can get you somewhat further. A manual or a tutorial would be a great contribution to this library.

Features

• LIL nicely combines ad-hoc polymorphism (CLOS-powered object oriented programming) and parametric polymorphism (as in ML functors, C++ templates, etc.). To our knowledge, only scalaz matches the expressiveness of LIL.

• LIL sports both pure (persistent, immutable) and stateful (ephemeral, mutable) variants of data structures in Interface-Passing Style. This variants are in the respective packages PURE and STATEFUL; a common core is shared in package INTERFACE, covering read-only operations; automatic transforms allow bridging from stateful to pure and back.

• LIL supports data structures in traditional Object-Oriented Style, in both stateful (the usual Object-Oriented kind) and pure variants, in the respective packages POSH and CLASSY. There too, automatic transforms to go from Interface-Passing Style to traditional Object-Oriented Style and back.

Building it

LIL needs to be built using ASDF 3.1 or later:

Indeed, LIL notably relies on ASDF 3.1's package-inferred-system. whereby instead of dependencies being listed in a central .asd file, each source file has a defpackage form from which the dependencies are deduced. While we think it's a great way to write Lisp code, you don't have to use it in your own code to use LIL.

LIL also depends on fare-utils, fare-memoization, closer-mop, alexandria.

Using it

See test/pure-map.lisp and test/stateful-map.lisp for examples of how to use LIL. Unhappily, no one is working on documentation at this time.