ERFI

ERFI, standing for "Emacs Lisp Reconstruction for Indivisuals", is a set of libraries to fill the gap of default Emacs Lisp and practical applications. ERFI is developed under the slogan of "Make and keep codes readable, maitenable and elegant with admissible efficiency loss". To realize it, APIs of ERFI are based on SRFI, as you may know, libraries standing for "Scheme Requests for Implementation". ERFI also takes in philosophy of Gauche and Haskell.

Introduction

An example is erfi:let, an implementation of named let with interface of SRFI-5. This realizes Tail Recursion Optimization (not Tail Call Optimization) by expanding it to usual efficient while loop. One can use it for recursion without spending stack; calculation of factorial with nomral recursion will cause stack overflow. (Emacs's default stack size is 600.) A simple example is the following:

(require 'erfi-macros)

(defun fact (n)
  (if (< n 0)
      "Argument out of range"
      (erfi:let lp ((n n) (r 1))
        (if (zerop n)
            r
            (lp (- n 1) (* r n))))))

(fact 5)
; => 120

The above code is tedious and uninteresting; everyone can write down it using explicit while loop. However, the real power of erfi:let will be seen, for example, when you use it for loop more than one dimensional. In my humble opinion, these recursion, looking like normal recursion, is more readable than "loop" langage in CL because named let is in the range of Lisp langage. Writing complicated loop will show the difference vividly.

Another aspect is functional programming. ERFI recommends and supports it in the case that performance requirement is not so strict. There are a lot of functions and macros to write functional codes easily and elegantly. In general, FP makes codes simple and expresses directly what the code should do; lesser side effects make appearance of bugs rarerer.

(require 'erfi-macros)
(erfi:use-short-macro-name)
(require 'erfi-srfi-1)

;; SRFI-26 `cut' is shorter `lambda' for special case.
(mapcar (cut * 2 <>) (erfi:iota 10))
; => (0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18)

;; 2 * 5!
(apply (cut '* 2 <...>) (erfi:iota 5 1))
; => 240

;; "uniq" in shells for list.
(nreverse (erfi:foldl (lambda (acc x)
                        (if (eq x (car acc))
                            acc
                            (cons x acc)))
                      '()
                      '(a a a b b c c b c d d d)))
; => (a b c b c d)

;; Non anaphoric `aif'
(if-let1 ans (y-or-n-p "Do you like anaphoric macros and dynamic bindings?")
  (message "You'll be tangled with bugs caused by them.")
  (message "Ditto."))

(let1 alist `((:foo . ,(erfi:iota 10))
              (:bar . ,(make-list 10 9))
              (:bla . "not used")
              (:baz . (1 9 8 8 0 1 1 8)))
  ;; Take assosiated values, take only odds, and take head 3 element.
  (erfi:map (erfi:$ erfi:take <> 3 $ erfi:filter 'oddp $ cdr-safe $ 'assq $*)
            '(:foo :bar :baz)
            (erfi:circular-list alist)))
; => ((1 3 5) (9 9 9) (1 9 1))

Here erfi:$ is Haskell-ish composition from Gauche, which emphasizes flow of data and allows one to avoid deep indentations.

Features and states

Feature	Library	State	Test
Macros imported from SRFI and Gauche	erfi-macros.el	Complete and matured	Good
SRFI-1 List Library	erfi-srfi-1.el	Complete and matured	Incomplete
SRFI-13 String Library	erfi-srfi-13.el	Not all	Incomplete
Features from Gauche	erfi-gauche.el	As I need	Incomplete
Hash tables	erfi-hash-table.el	As I need	Good
Regular expressions	erfi-regexp.el	As I need	Incomplete
Haskell influenced record syntax	erfi-hairs.el	Experimental	Incomplete
Name spaces	erfi-namespace.el	Under construction	Nothing
Wrappers of Emacs APIs and auxiliaries for practical apps.	erfi-emacs.el	As I need	Incomplete
Miscellaneous, currently only etched overlays	erfi-misc.el	As I need	Incomplete

TODO

• Write complete test for erfi-srfi-1.el.
• Test and compare implementations of SRFI-1.
• Write doc string in erfi-srfi-1.el.