Lisp in Small Parts

Printing

When you evaluate a Lisp procedure in the Listener it returns a value. But when you're running a program you might want it to print out several values before the program returns a final result. Lisp provides several alternative functions specifically for printing out values. 

Printing a result: print

The simplest of these is print - it simply prints out a printed representation of its argument, and then returns the argument. So if you evaluate, for example:

CL-USER 1 > (print 123)
123 
123

(defun print-and-double (n) (print n) (* n 2))

If we evaluate it we get:

CL-USER 3 > (print-and-double 12)
12 
24

Printing formatted values: format

The Swiss army knife of printing is format. It includes options for printing every type of value in every conceivable way, and I would guess that most Lisp programmers only use a small subset of its capabilities. I'll just cover its most useful features here:

The format procedure takes two or more parameters.

The first parameter is either t, to tell the format procedure to print the result, or nil, to return the result as a string.

The second parameter is a format string, which tells the format procedure how to print the result. This is a text string which can include special format sequences, prefixed by a "~" character (called a "tilde" or "twiddle"), to insert values in this string.

The remaining parameters are evaluated to give the values to be inserted into the format string. The most general format sequence is "~a" which inserts the value as it would be printed by print. So, for example:

(format t "The answer is ~a." (* 2 3))

inserts the value of (* 2 3) into the string specified by the ~a, and prints:

The answer is 6.

You can also include ~% in the format string to give a line break.

Alternatively, by specifying the second parameter as nil we can use format to generate a string for us, so:

(format nil "The answer is ~a." (* 2 3))

will return:

"The answer is 6."

There are more examples of using format in the Animals project.

Exercises

1. Use format to write a story-writing program. The procedure story should take a name, food, and colour; for example:

(story "Lisa" "cheese" "green")

and produce a story like:

There once was a princess called Lisa who liked cheese. One day Lisa found some green cheese and ate so much that she died. The end.