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thephoeron / LLTHW

Learn Lisp The Hard Way source-code and full book text
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Chapter 1.12, Namespaces, Packages etc. #22

Open thephoeron opened 9 years ago

thephoeron commented 9 years ago

Extend the exercises on Packages to include an enlightening factoid from The Complete Idiot's Guide to Common Lisp Packages by Erann Gat:

"The most important thing to understand about packages is that they are fundamentally a part of the Lisp reader and not the evaluator."

This is essential to the understanding of macroexpansion across package namespaces, as pointed out by Doug Hoyte in regards to anaphoric macros; thus the namespaces and packages chapter should potentially appear before the new chapters in part one for Macros and Reader Macros, per issue #15.

inaimathi commented 9 years ago

We can re-visit basic reader interaction when we start discussing packages. Something like briefly showing the result of (read-from-string "nonexistent-package:foo"), and discussing what it actually means.

thephoeron commented 9 years ago

Yeah that would be a good approach