November 2010
Intermediate to advanced
504 pages
12h 45m
English
Content preview from Land of LispBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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The Symmetry Between Code and Data in Lisp
You have seen that Lisp has very elegant and symmetrical facilities for translating raw string data from the outside world and converting it to and from Lisp syntax expressions. But Lisp has an even deeper symmetry. It can treat program code and data interchangeably. A programming language that uses the same data structures to store data and program code is called homoiconic.
You saw an example of homoiconicity in Chapter 3, when we discussed code mode and data mode. In that example, we used the quote to change between the two modes:
> '(+ 1 2);data mode (+ 1 2)> (+ 1 2);code mode 3
In the previous chapter, we took this concept one step further by using a quasiquote when defining the describe-path function. ...
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I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.