Programmatic Manipulation of Common Lisp Type Specifiers

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Abstract

In this article we contrast the use of the s-expression with the BDD (Binary Decision Diagram) as a data structure for programmatically manipulating Common Lisp type specifiers. The s-expression is the de facto standard surface syntax and also programmatic representation of the type specifier, but the BDD data structure offers advantages: most notably, type equivalence checks using s-expressions can be computationally intensive, whereas the type equivalence check using BDDs is a check for object identity. As an implementation and performance experimentwe define the notion of maximal disjoint type decomposition, and discuss implementations of algorithms to compute it: a brute force iteration, and as a tree reduction. The experimental implementations represent type specifiers by both aforementioned data structures, and we compare the performance observed in each approach.

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Bibtex (lrde.bib)

@InProceedings{	  newton.17.els,
  author	= {Jim Newton and Didier Verna and Maximilien Colange},
  title		= {Programmatic Manipulation of {C}ommon {L}isp Type
		  Specifiers},
  booktitle	= {European Lisp Symposium},
  year		= 2017,
  lrdestatus	= accepted,
  address	= {Brussels, Belgium},
  month		= apr,
  abstract	= {In this article we contrast the use of the s-expression
		  with the BDD (Binary Decision Diagram) as a data structure
		  for programmatically manipulating Common Lisp type
		  specifiers. The s-expression is the de facto standard
		  surface syntax and also programmatic representation of the
		  type specifier, but the BDD data structure offers
		  advantages: most notably, type equivalence checks using
		  s-expressions can be computationally intensive, whereas the
		  type equivalence check using BDDs is a check for object
		  identity. As an implementation and performance experiment,
		  we define the notion of maximal disjoint type
		  decomposition, and discuss implementations of algorithms to
		  compute it: a brute force iteration, and as a tree
		  reduction. The experimental implementations represent type
		  specifiers by both aforementioned data structures, and we
		  compare the performance observed in each approach.},
  note		= {accepted}
}