[armedbear-devel] ABCL introductory user documentation

[Paul Reiners]

Thanks!  I'll fix that up when I get home from work tonight.

Paul


On Jul 30, 2009, at 2:48 AM, Alessio Stalla wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 2:38 AM, Paul  
> Reiners<paul.reiners at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Some introductory user documentation I wrote on ABCL if anyone's
>> interested:
>>
>>        http://www.automatous-monk.com/jvmlanguages/abcl/Armed_Bear_Common_Lisp.html
>>
>> It's spread across a bunch of slides right now, because I first
>> prepared it as a multi-slide presentation.  I think I want to combine
>> it all into one HTML page later this week when I get around to it.   
>> At
>> the very least, I want to give each slide a meaningful title so that
>> the Table of Contents is more meaningful.
>>
>> Any criticism, constructive or destructive, is welcome.
>
> Good work! It's nice to see introductory documentation for abcl.
>
> Now the (constructive) criticism part :) I found an inaccuracy on
> Slide 10, regarding boxing/unboxing of values. Indeed boxing and
> unboxing is done automatically by ABCL. In your case, had you wrapped
> your ints in Fixnums instead of JavaObjects, you could have used them
> directly in Lisp. In general, since the user can't be expected to know
> how to map every Java type to Lisp and vice-versa, there are a couple
> of nice methods you can use in all cases:
>
> public static LispObject JavaObject.getInstance(Object, boolean)
> converts (or wraps) a Java object to a Lisp object, if the boolean is
> true (else it just wraps it in a JavaObject).
>
> public Object LispObject.javaInstance()
> converts (or unwraps) a Lisp object to Java. You can invoke this on
> any Lisp object, if it can't be converted, it will be returned as-is.
>
> hth,
> Alessio