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 22LOOP for Black Belts
In Chapter 7 I briefly discussed the extended LOOP macro. As I mentioned then, LOOP provides what is essentially a special-purpose language just for writing iteration constructs.
This might seem like a lot of bother—inventing a whole language just for writing loops. But if you think about the ways loops are used in programs, it actually makes a fair bit of sense. Any program of any size at all will contain quite a number of loops. And while they won't all be the same, they won't all be unique either; patterns will emerge, particularly if you include the code immediately preceding and following the loops—patterns of how things are set up for the loop, patterns in what gets done in the loop proper, and patterns in ...