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Simple and efficient compilation of list comprehension in common Lisp

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Mario LatendresseAuthors Info & Claims

ILC '07: Proceedings of the 2007 International Lisp Conference

Article No.: 12, Pages 1 - 6

https://doi.org/10.1145/1622123.1622137

Published: 01 April 2007 Publication History

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Abstract

List Comprehension is a succinct syntactic form to describe lists in functional languages. It uses nested generators (i.e., iterators) and filters (i.e., Boolean expressions). The former generates lists, whereas the latter restricts the contents of these lists. List Comprehension translation is commonly based on Wadler's rules that emit code based on recursive functions. This code often results either in stack overflow or in inefficient execution for many Common Lisp implementations.

We present a very simple technique to compile List Comprehension in the Loop Facility of Common Lisp, resulting in efficient code that avoids stack overflow. Our translation code is also very short, with an emitted code very close to the user-specified list comprehension.

We also present a translation into more fundamental constructs of Common Lisp that often results in even more efficient code, although this translation is more complex than using the Loop Facility.

The author has used the first translation technique for compiling a new language called Bio Velo, which is part of bioinformatics software called Pathway Tools [2].

References

[1]

Guy L. Steele Jr. Common Lisp, The Language, Second Edition. Digital Press, 1990.

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[2]

Peter D. Karp, Suzanne Paley, and Pedro Romero. The Pathway Tools software. Bioinformatics, 18(S):225--32, 2002.

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[3]

Guy Lapalme. Implementation of a "Lisp comprehension" macro. SIGPLAN Lisp Pointers, IV(2):16--23, 1991.

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[4]

Simon L. Peyton-Jones. The Implementation of Functional Languages. Prentice-Hall, 1987.

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[5]

Sven-Olof Nyström. Generalized comprehensions for Common Lisp. http://user.it.uu.se/~svenolof/Collect, 2007.

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Wang YSunderraman R(2008)Database Management System for Protein Structure DataInnovations and Advanced Techniques in Systems, Computing Sciences and Software Engineering10.1007/978-1-4020-8735-6_98(526-531)Online publication date: 2008
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-8735-6_98

Index Terms

Simple and efficient compilation of list comprehension in common Lisp
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Compilers
    2. General programming languages
      1. Language types

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Published In

ILC '07: Proceedings of the 2007 International Lisp Conference

April 2007

187 pages

ISBN:9781595936189

DOI:10.1145/1622123

Conference Chairs:
Carl Shapiro
SRI International
,
Pascal Costanza
Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium
,
Program Chair:
JonL White
The Ginger Ice Cream Factory

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SIGPLAN: ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Published: 01 April 2007

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ILC07: 2007 International Lisp Conference

April 1 - 4, 2007

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Wang YSunderraman R(2008)Database Management System for Protein Structure DataInnovations and Advanced Techniques in Systems, Computing Sciences and Software Engineering10.1007/978-1-4020-8735-6_98(526-531)Online publication date: 2008
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-8735-6_98

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Implementation of a “Lisp comprehension” macro

Common Lisp: Lisp (programming language), Programming language, American National Standards Institute, Specification (technical standard), Free and open source software, Programming paradigm

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Implementation of a “Lisp comprehension” macro

Common Lisp: Lisp (programming language), Programming language, American National Standards Institute, Specification (technical standard), Free and open source software, Programming paradigm

Tachyon Common Lisp: an efficient and portable implementation of CLtL2

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