April 2005
Beginner to intermediate
528 pages
16h 20m
English
Content preview from Practical Common Lisp
Become 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,
Start your free trial
CHAPTER 10Numbers, Characters,and Strings
While functions, variables, macros, and 25 special operators provide the basic building blocks of the language itself, the building blocks of your programs will be the data structures you use. As Fred Brooks observed in The Mythical Man-Month, "Representation is the essence of programming."1
Common Lisp provides built-in support for most of the data types typically found in modern languages: numbers (integer, floating point, and complex), characters, strings, arrays (including multidimensional arrays), lists, hash tables, input and output streams, and an abstraction for portably representing filenames. Functions are also a first-class data type in Lisp—they can be stored in variables, passed as arguments, ...