7 Additional Extensions to Common Lisp
7.1 About extensions to Common Lisp
When implementing Common Lisp, it is often convenient to define a set of functions that operate on data structures at a lower level of abstraction than those that are generally available. In fact, such low-level data structures are used to implement the higher-level data structures of Common Lisp. You might need functions that specialize the behavior of Common Lisp functions or that have better performance. You could devise flags to control other Common Lisp constructs. You might also want to include functions from older Lisp dialects as a convenience to the implementors of those dialects. The extensions to Common Lisp that appear in this chapter provide such capabilities; they are grouped as follows:
- Section 7.2, "Input/Output system extensions" describes extensions that improve input and output operations, such as the fast I/O system, the buffered interface, and functions for array I/O.
- Section 7.3, "Packages" presents the revised Liquid Common Lisp package system, extensions to
make-package, and other useful package information. - Section 7.4, "Floating-point numbers" discusses the floating-point format used in Liquid Common Lisp and presents extensions related to numbers.
- Section 7.5, "The Load Facility" describes how the Common Lisp function
load has been extended to allow a choice of loading behaviors. It also describes changes that affect the way you specify a pathname. - Section 7.6, "Hash table extensions" presents functions that provide access to the components of the Common Lisp function
make-hash-table, as well as a function for rehashing. - Section 7.7, "CLOS extensions" presents miscellaneous extensions to the Common Lisp Object System.
- Section 7.8, "Other extensions" lists the remaining extensions in alphabetical order.
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