Aaron Feng comments

"Learning from io" by Leslie P. Polzer

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 07:37:54 -0400

In Common Lisp you could just add a method specialized on NIL (or write a macro that does this automatically).

An alternative would be using the MOP for this.

"Learning from io" by Jonathan Tran

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 01:05:41 -0400

So what you're saying is... you implemented the Maybe monad in Ruby.

"Closure Fun" by Andrew Gwozdziewycz

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 21:44:44 -0400

It retains state because it modifies the original string in place. This is a very bad thing. You should make a copy of the string before using it. I believe the creators of C had qualms about including it in the standard library.

"Data recovery part 1: Freeze the dead hard drive" by Todd

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 10:42:05 -0400

Yeah we've been spoiled by HDDs these days, almost never failing. And so we grow lax with our backups.

I'm going to do some backing up when I get home.

"Data recovery part 1: Freeze the dead hard drive" by rotts

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 00:20:19 -0400

man, seems you have had luck on the Apple front! at least with your macbook. sorry to hear about the data loss, but yeah you should be backing up data that you love :)

usb/firewire drives are so cheap these days.

"Data recovery part 1: Freeze the dead hard drive" by Aaron Feng

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 06:21:17 -0400

I'm pretty sure there is something physically wrong with the drive itself.

"Data recovery part 1: Freeze the dead hard drive" by Leslie P. Polzer

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 05:34:15 -0400

I don't know much about OSX, but perhaps giving it a try with a GNU/Linux boot CD might work?

"Lisp ninja 2 - Refactoring" by Leslie P. Polzer

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 09:07:28 -0400

And here's another take on PARSE-PHP-ARRAY using LOOP:

(defun parse-php-array (array)
  (loop for value in (mapcar #'get-array-value
                            (split-sequence #\Newline array))
        collect value into values
        finally (return (nreverse values))))

I'm not sure why you want to reverse the values at the end, but here it is.

"Lisp ninja 2 - Refactoring" by Leslie P. Polzer

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 08:59:36 -0400

Wow, lots of spam here. Maybe you should turn on comment approval or some sort of CAPTCHA...

Anyway, here's my Shinobi take of GET-FUNCTION-SIGNATURE:

(defun get-function-signature (function-info)
  (let ((name (first function-info))
        (parameters (rest function-info)))
    (format nil "~A(~{~A~^, ~})" name (mapcar #'quote-string parameters))))

"Closure Fun" by Leslie P. Polzer

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 05:49:49 -0400

This generator pattern is very common in C, and PHP borrows a lot from C (see strtok(3) for the C interface of this function). Python guys like to do stuff like this, too.

How it works: the binding to REST is established on execution of the code once (and initialized to NIL). After that, the content of the variable is maintained by the code that is executed in the function body.

Note that this implementation of strtok isn't thread-safe. Multiple threads will share REST among them.

By the way, you can also just write

(let (rest) ...

if you want.