Self-reproducing programs in Common Lisp

Evolving Self-Reproducing Programs

This paper investigates the problem of evolving a self-reproducing program. It i s hoped that the analysis of this process might aid the understanding of the process by which the first self-reproducing molecules gave rise to life. We see this work as the meta-level o f the well-known investigations into the biochemical precursors to life. This paper presents a sample self-reproducing program, d...

Khepera-LISP Interface for Allegro Common LISP

Maintaining Portable Lisp Programs

We examine the use of read-time feature conditionals, with particular emphasis on writing portable Common Lisp code which aspires to both forwardsand backwards-compatibility. We examine cases from real libraries which demonstrate the various pitfalls, and propose a scheme for robust treatment of implementation-specific functionality by performing programmatic tests at the appropriate time. We d...

Grouping Common Lisp Benchmarks

Compiler benchmarks provide a means for compiler writers to measure their performance, as well as for potential users to estimate whether a given implementation will suit their performance needs. We present a simple application of clustering algorithms in the programmatic examination of a freely-available suite of benchmarks to estimate the similarity of the codepaths tested, and find a groupin...

Pragmatic Parsing in Common Lisp

We review META, a classic technique for building recursive descent parsers, that is both simple and efficient. While META does not handle all possible regular or context-free grammars, it handles a surprisingly large fraction of the grammars encountered by Lisp programmers. We show how META can be used to parse streams, strings and lists—including Common Lisp's hairy lambda expression parameter...