[Gsll-devel] About the naming convention in gsll

[Tamas K Papp]

On Fri, May 16, 2008 at 04:20:48PM -0600, Zach wrote:

> Also, I am happy to see that Liam has posted a reply clearing up the comment
> on passing arrays by value.  In most languages (including CL) certain
> objects are passed by value (in Lisp, numbers and characters), and some are
> passed by pointer, err, reference, don't know what exactly to call it (in
> Lisp, pretty much everything else).  This was a point of confusion in my
> head when I first learned Lisp; it took me a while to realize that Lisp's
> implicit behavior is exactly the same as C's explicit behavior (with the
> exception of C's struct copying).

I learned to like the CL approach.  My philosophy is that I only copy
arrays when they are modified, everywhere else I just pass the
"reference".

> Foreign Friendly Arrays (FFA) is a library.  You will not find info on it in
> the hyperspec.  Look at the author's website (I believe this is your work,
> Tamas, right?) or the archives of this mailing list for that matter.

The original announcement is here:
http://tkpapp.blogspot.com/2007/12/announcement-ffa.html

It is asdf-installable, but one can also get the source from my
website.

What ffa does is that it tries to make a Lisp array available to C
functions if the implementation and the array type permits (eg pinning
in SBCL), and if not, it will be copied back and/or forth as needed.
The package has a tutorial which I think explains things well.  I
prefer to keep my arrays in Lisp, hence this package.

Tamas