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 30Practical: An HTML GenerationLibrary, the Interpreter
In this chapter and the next you'll take a look under the hood of the FOO HTML generator that you've been using in the past few chapters. FOO is an example of a kind of programming that's quite common in Common Lisp and relatively uncommon in non-Lisp languages, namely, language-oriented programming. Rather than provide an API built primarily out of functions, classes, and macros, FOO provides language processors for a domain-specific language that you can embed in your Common Lisp programs.
FOO provides two language processors for the same s-expression language. One is an interpreter that takes a FOO "program" as data and interprets it to generate HTML. The other is a compiler ...