The Advanced User's Guide

4 Working Beyond the Lisp Environment

Liquid Common Lisp provides two mechanisms for interacting with external languages: the Foreign Function Interface and the function run-program.

The Foreign Function Interface allows you to load code that is written in computer languages other than Lisp into the Lisp environment, and it creates Lisp functions to call non-Lisp code. Similarly, you can write functions in this interface that convert information provided by Lisp functions to a format that can be used in a foreign environment.

The functionrun-program calls an executable program from Lisp. It can optionally redirect the standard input, standard output, and error output streams of the program to Lisp streams.

The manner in which the Foreign Function Interface operates is distinguished from the operations performed byrun-program in an important way:

All of the functions, macros, and variables described in this chapter are extensions to Common Lisp.

4.1 - The Foreign Function Interface
4.2 - Running UNIX programs from Lisp
4.3 - The C-to-FFI facility

The Advanced User's Guide - 9 SEP 1996

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