1 Mar 2004 bmastenbrook   » (Master)

So, I've decided to embarrass myself and release my s-expression to C translator. The goal here is to come up with a suitable target representation for a compiler, without having to worry about actual C syntax in the compiler itself. Since it supports macros, you can build the target language a bit higher too. As an example, consider Duff's Device - it can be expressed for a fixed amount of unrolling in plain C, but you can't vary that except with possibly some horrendously complex C++ templates. The macro to generate Duff's Device reads as follows:

#@(defmacro #@make-duff #@(to from count n-type size)
    `#@(let ((,n-type n (/ (+ ,count ,#@(- #@size 1)) ,size)))
         (switch (mod ,count ,size)
                 (case 0)
                 (do/while
                  ((setq (deref ,to) (deref (post-incf ,from)))
                   ,@#@(loop for i from (- #@size 1) downto 1
                          append `#@((case ,#@i)
                                     (setq (deref ,to) (deref (post-incf ,from))))))
                  (> (decf n) 0)))))
The #@'s there are to bounce back and forth between readtables - the s-expression C needs to be read into a table which preserves case and also preserves backslashes in strings, so #@ is defined to take you between that table and an ordinary one.

There is documentation up as well, and a developer mailing list. It's not complete yet at all, but already it's useful to me. Ideas, suggestions, and complaints about opening up lisp macros to C are welcome :-)

Also, I should mention my common-idioms package here - I see a lot of similar macros out there, and I recently noted that Pascal Costanza reinvented the destructuring-case macro. Mine has a few more features, so if you're doing some heavy destructuring you might want to take a look at it.

The rest of the package is worthwhile to me too - it contains an anaphoric if with a setf-it macro, an anaphoric if that tests on the second return value and binds "it" to the first (very useful!), multiple-value aggregating reduce (my favorite iteration construct of all time), and some other useful tools.

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