Re: Compile time executed functions

[Ted Dennison<dennison@telepath.com>]

In article <87lmprow3a.fsf@deneb.enyo.de>, Florian Weimer says...
>
>Ted Dennison<dennison@telepath.com> writes:
>
>> However, I have used Common Lisp, and I never came across that
>> capability before. How do you do it? 
>
>You build the function (or a lambda expression) using the usual
>methods, and then call COMPILE on it.  Simple, isn't it? ;-)
>

Admittedly, there are probably tons of nifty Lisp tricks I've never learned. But
that just generates code for the function, right? It doesn't actually execute
the code, find the resulting return value, then place that value in a data
object *during compile time*. To do that, you'd have to use
define-compiler-macro. Again, I'm no Lisp expert, but I don't see why
define-compiler-macro would have been placed in the language, if its effect
could be achieved without it. (Although it seems to me that even
define-compiler-macro for a complicated function would just expand to the code
required to compute the value, not to the value itself).

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