objective-lisp/README.md

objective-lisp

Syntactic sugar for object-oriented Lisp.

objective-lisp provides a simple, concise, and (slightly) more conventional syntax for accessing the slots and methods of objects. It defines a reader macro for the [ and ] characters (although you can change these in the code).

Usage

TL;DR: [object (method args)] is like object.method(args) in C++.

First, to enable objective-lisp's syntax, just load the system:

(asdf:load-system 'objective-lisp)

objective-lisp's syntax takes the form of a special S-expression, contained in square brackets rather than parentheses. Each expression within acts upon the result of the previous one, like a chain of . (dot) operators in C-like languages.

[foo (bar) (baz) (quux)]
;; C++: foo.bar().baz().quux()

To call a method, just write it after the object:

[object (method args...)]
;; => (method object args...)

Slot accessors, and other methods that don't take additional arguments, can be written without enclosing parentheses:

[object get-something]
;; => (get-something object)

Under the hood, this just passes object as the first argument to method, so you can do stuff like this (I won't kinkshame you, but your coworkers might):

[object (slot-value 'slot-name) (setf value)]
;; => [(slot-value object 'slot-name) (setf value)]
;;  => (setf (slot-value object 'slot-name) value)

To access slots directly, use the :slot keyword:

[object :slot slot-name]
;; => (slot-value object 'slot-name)

License

objective-lisp is public domain (CC0). You can do whatever you want with it. I don't really care about credit, it's just a silly little thing I wrote in a few hours. (And then rewrote just now because the syntax sucked.)

But if you find it useful, please let me know. I'd love to hear about it.