Clamp: Common Lisp with Arc Macros and Procedures

by Michael Malis (originally at https://github.com/malisper/Clamp)

Arc is an amazing programming language because of its brevity and succinctness, but at the same time, it lacks some of the most basic features of a programming language. It has neither a debugger nor a module system. Common Lisp on the other hand has many of the fundamentals that Arc lacks and much more (restarts, reader macros, etc), but lacks the conciseness of Arc. Clamp is an attempt to bring the powerful, but verbose, language of Common Lisp up to the terseness of Arc.

There are currently two parts to Clamp. There is the core of Clamp, which implements the utilities of Arc that are easily converted from Arc to Common Lisp. The other part is the 'experimental' part. It contains features of Arc that are not so easy to copy (ssyntax, argument destructuring, etc).

The package :clamp exports not only the symbols that are new in Clamp, but also exports most of the symbols from the :cl package. This is done so that it is possible to shadow Common Lisp operators which do different things than the Arc operators of the same names. By using Clamp in a package, you are automatically using most of the symbols exported by :cl (some, such as rplaca, have not been exported because use of them is generally considered bad style).

The package :clamp-experimental works a little differently. It only exports the new symbols it defines. In order to use both :clamp and :clamp-experimental, you will have to use both and then handle the conflicts.

In both packages, a lot of code has been taken from both the original Arc and Anarki.

To install Clamp you'll need a Common Lisp implementation. One way is to install SBCL and the Quicklisp package manager on Linux:

  $ sudo apt-get install sbcl  # other Common Lisp implementations might work as well
  $ wget https://beta.quicklisp.org/quicklisp.lisp  # following instructions at https://quicklisp.org
  $ sbcl --load quicklisp.lisp
  * (quicklisp-quickstart:install)
  * (ql:add-to-init-file)
  * (quit)

(These instructions were tested on Ubuntu 14.04 with sbcl 1.1.14.)

Now add the Clamp git repository to ~/quicklisp/local-projects. Then you can start up clamp in three ways:

a) Run the 'clamp' script in the repo:

  $ clamp
  * (map [+ _ 1] '(1 2 3))

This requires either that you be in ~/quicklisp/local-projects/Clamp, or that you copy the 'clamp' script somewhere in your PATH.

b) If you want to run from any directory and don't want to mess with the PATH, you'll need to type in a few commands into sbcl:

  $ sbcl
  * (ql:quickload :clamp)
  * (in-package :clamp)
  * (use-syntax :clamp)

c) To run Clamp with Emacs, follow the instructions to install MELPA and SLIME at https://www.common-lisp.net/project/slime/doc/html/Installation.html, and then add these lines in your .emacs:

  (setq inferior-lisp-program (concat (getenv "HOME") "/quicklisp/local-projects/Clamp/clamp"))
  (add-hook 'lisp-mode-hook (lambda () (slime-mode t)))

Either way, you should now be ready to go:

  * (map [+ _ 1] '(1 2 3))  ; example showing off Arc-specific syntax
  (2 3 4)

Finally, to run Clamp's unit tests:

  * (ql:quickload :clamp-tests)
  * (in-package :clamp-tests)
  * (run-suite 'clamp)

arclanguage / Clamp

readme

Clamp: Common Lisp with Arc Macros and Procedures