Land of Lisp: Learn to Program in Lisp, One Game at a Time!

508 Pages·2010·18.64 MB·English

Conrad Barski, M.D.

LAND OF LISP

LAND OF LISP
Learn to Program in Lisp,
One Game at a Time!
by Conrad Barski, M.D.
San Francisco
LAND OF LISP. Copyright © 2011 by Conrad Barski, M.D.
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior
written permission of the copyright owner and the publisher.
Printed in Canada
14 13 12 11 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
ISBN-10: 1-59327-281-2
ISBN-13: 978-1-59327-281-4
Publisher: William Pollock
Production Editors: Ansel Staton and Serena Yang
Developmental Editor: Keith Fancher
Technical Reviewers: Philip Fominykh and Heow Eide-Goodman
Copyeditor: Marilyn Smith
Compositor: Susan Glinert Stevens
Proofreader: Linda Seifert
Indexer: Nancy Guenther
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No Starch Press, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Barski, Conrad.
Land of Lisp : learn to program in Lisp, one game at a time! / by Conrad Barski.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-59327-281-4
ISBN-10: 1-59327-281-2
1. Computer games--Programming 2. COMMON LISP (Computer program language) 3. LISP (Computer program language)
I. Title.
QA76.76.C672B3693 2010
794.8'1526--dc22
2010026755
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taken in the preparation of this work, neither the author nor No Starch Press, Inc. shall have any liability to any
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information contained in it.
For Lauren

B R I E F C O N T E N T S
Acknowledgments........................................................................................................xvii
Introduction....................................................................................................................1
SECTION I: LISP IS POWER
Chapter 1: Getting Started with Lisp................................................................................15
Chapter 2: Creating Your First Lisp Program.....................................................................21
Chapter 3: Exploring the Syntax of Lisp Code...................................................................31
SECTION II: LISP IS SYMMETRY
Chapter 4: Making Decisions with Conditions..................................................................49
Chapter 5: Building a Text Game Engine.........................................................................67
Chapter 6: Interacting with the World: Reading and Printing in Lisp....................................85
Chapter 6.5: lambda: A Function So Important It Deserves Its Own Chapter.......................103
Chapter 7: Going Beyond Basic Lists.............................................................................107
Chapter 8: This Ain’t Your Daddy’s Wumpus..................................................................129
Chapter 9: Advanced Datatypes and Generic Programming............................................153
SECTION III: LISP IS HACKING..................................................................................191
Chapter 10: Looping with the loop Command................................................................195
Chapter 11: Printing Text with the format Function...........................................................221
Chapter 12: Working with Streams...............................................................................237
Chapter 13: Let’s Create a Web Server!........................................................................253
Functional Programming Is Beautiful..............................................................................269
SECTION IV: LISP IS SCIENCE
Chapter 14: Ramping Lisp Up a Notch with Functional Programming................................291
Chapter 15: Dice of Doom, a Game Written in the Functional Style..................................303
Chapter 16: The Magic of Lisp Macros..........................................................................339
Chapter 17: Domain-Specific Languages........................................................................355
Chapter 18: Lazy Programming....................................................................................375
Chapter 19: Creating a Graphical, Web-Based Version of Dice of Doom..........................401
Chapter 20: Making Dice of Doom More Fun.................................................................417
Epilogue....................................................................................................................429
Index.........................................................................................................................465
viii Brief Contents