Bill Clementson's Blog

New Lisp Online Search Tools

Thursday, February 16, 2006

A number of interesting online Lisp search tools have popped up recently and it's worth having a look at them:

• Lisp Dictionary (lispdoc): This is an interesting project developed by William Bland. You type in a CL keyword and you get back some example code using that keyword (taken from PCL and PAIP) as well as links to the pages in CLHS, PCL, and Successful Lisp where that keyword is used. You can also type in the unique abbreviation for a function (e.g. type in "w-o-f" for "with-open-file") in your searches and you can do either basic searches (limits the results to just the definitions) or full text searches (returns links to all references of a keyword in the supported texts). Nick Allan has created an elisp function that you can put into your .emacs file to call when you're editing lisp code in Emacs. And, Rick Scott has shown how you can use it as an alternative search engine in the Firefox browser. Neat stuff!
• Common Lisp Directory: Marc Battyani created this useful resource. It's a user-updatable resource of everything to do with CL. Sorta like a more structured version of CLiki. Paolo Amoroso has coordinated a lot of the updates to this directory using the help of the CL Gardeners to get the info in.
• PLT Source Browser: This is a PLT Scheme-specific lookup facility. It was developed by Jens Axel Søgaard and provides a convenient mechanism for exploring PLT collections by Authors, Packages, Collections and SVN Branches, allowing you to drill down to the source files in each. There is also the beginning of an effort to graphically represent the collections (this is similar to what Gary King did with his asdf-install library dependency graph).

"DrScheme alreay has a graphical tool to examine dependencies, so adding this to the source browser is just for convenient navigation.

See the screenshot at bottom of:

< http://www.plt-scheme.org/software/drscheme/tour/tour-Z-H-12.html#node_chap_11>"