Didier Verna

A corpus processing and analysis pipeline for Quickref

By Antoine Hacquard, Didier Verna

2021-05-01

In ELS 2021, the 14th european lisp symposium

Abstract Quicklisp is a library manager working with your existing Common Lisp implementation to download and install around 2000 libraries, from a central archive. Quickref, an application itself written in Common Lisp, generates, automatically and by introspection, a technical documentation for every library in Quicklisp, and produces a website for this documentation. In this paper, we present a corpus processing and analysis pipeline for Quickref. This pipeline consists of a set of natural language processing blocks allowing us to analyze Quicklisp libraries, based on natural language contents sources such as README files, docstrings, or symbol names.

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(Dynamic (programming paradigms)) ;; performance and expressivity

By Didier Verna

2020-07-10

In

Abstract

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Quickref: Common Lisp reference documentation as a stress test for Texinfo

By Didier Verna

2019-11-06

In TUGboat

Abstract Quickref is a global documentation project for the Common Lisp ecosystem. It creates reference manuals automatically by introspecting libraries and generating corresponding documentation in Texinfo format. The Texinfo files may subsequently be converted into PDF or HTML. Quickref is non-intrusive: software developers do not have anything to do to get their libraries documented by the system.Quickref may be used to create a local website documenting your current, partial, working environment, but it is also able to document the whole Common Lisp ecosystem at once.

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Implementing baker’s SUBTYPEP decision procedure

By Léo Valais, Jim Newton, Didier Verna

2019-04-01

In ELS 2019, the 12th european lisp symposium

Abstract We present here our partial implementation of Baker’s decision procedure for SUBTYPEP. In his article “A Decision Procedure for Common Lisp’s SUBTYPEP Predicate”, he claims to provide implementation guidelines to obtain a SUBTYPEP more accurate and as efficient as the average implementation. However, he did not provide any serious implementation and his description is sometimes obscure. In this paper we present our implementation of part of his procedure, only supporting primitive types, CLOS classes, member, range and logical type specifiers.

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Parallelizing quickref

By Didier Verna

2019-04-01

In ELS 2019, the 12th european lisp symposium

Abstract Quickref is a global documentation project for Common Lisp software. It builds a website containing reference manuals for Quicklisp libraries. Each library is first compiled, loaded, and introspected. From the collected information, a Texinfo file is generated, which is then processed into an HTML one. Because of the large number of libraries in Quicklisp, doing this sequentially may require several hours of processing. We report on our experiments in parallelizing Quickref.

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Finite automata theory based optimization of conditional variable binding

By Jim Newton, Didier Verna

2019-01-14

In ELS 2019, the 12th european lisp symposium

Abstract We present an efficient and highly optimized implementation of destructuring-case in Common Lisp. This macro allows the selection of the most appropriate destructuring lambda list of several given based on structure and types of data at run-time and thereafter dispatches to the corresponding code branch. We examine an optimization technique, based on finite automata theory applied to conditional variable binding and execution, and type-based pattern matching on Common Lisp sequences.

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Recognizing heterogeneous sequences by rational type expression

By Jim Newton, Didier Verna

2018-09-14

In Proceedings of the meta’18: Workshop on meta-programming techniques and reflection

Abstract We summarize a technique for writing functions which recognize types of heterogeneous sequences in Common Lisp. The technique employs sequence recognition functions, generated at compile time, and evaluated at run-time. The technique we demonstrate extends the Common Lisp type system, exploiting the theory of rational languages, Binary Decision Diagrams, and the Turing complete macro facility of Common Lisp. The resulting system uses meta-programming to move an exponential complexity operation from run-time to a compile-time operation, leaving a highly optimized linear complexity operation for run-time.

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A theoretical and numerical analysis of the worst-case size of reduced ordered binary decision diagrams

By Jim Newton, Didier Verna

2018-08-28

In ACM Transactions on Computational Logic

Abstract Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs) and in particular ROBDDs (Reduced Ordered BDDs) are a common data structure for manipulating Boolean expressions, integrated circuit design, type inferencers, model checkers, and many other applications. Although the ROBDD is a lightweight data structure to implement, the behavior, in terms of memory allocation, may not be obvious to the program architect. We explore experimentally, numerically, and theoretically the typical and worst-case ROBDD sizes in terms of number of nodes and residual compression ratios, as compared to unreduced BDDs.

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Strategies in typecase optimization

By Jim Newton, Didier Verna

2018-04-05

In ELS 2018, the 11th european lisp symposium

Abstract We contrast two approaches to optimizing the Common Lisp typecase macro expansion. The first approach is based on heuristics intended to estimate run time performance of certain type checks involving Common Lisp type specifiers. The technique may, depending on code size, exhaustively search the space of permutations of the type checks, intent on finding the optimal order. With the second technique, we represent a typecase form as a type specifier, encapsulating the side-effecting non-Boolean parts so as to appear compatible with the Common Lisp type algebra operators.

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Method combinators

By Didier Verna

2018-03-25

In ELS 2018, the 11th european lisp symposium

Abstract In traditional object-oriented languages, the dynamic dispatch algorithm is hardwired: for every polymorphic call, only the most specific method is used. ClosClos, the Common Lisp Object System, goes beyond the traditional approach by providing an abstraction known as method combinationsmethod combinations: when several methods are applicable, it is possible to select several of them, decide in which order they will be called, and how to combine their results, essentially making the dynamic dispatch algorithm user-programmable.

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