Sunday 9 September 2012

MathP: Math notation in Common Lisp

MathP is my attempt at adding mathematical notation to Common Lisp.

Lisp has a beautiful, eminently grokkable syntax (if that even makes sense). It's great for general programming, macros and getting stuff done. Another of it's strengths is creating domain specific languages (DSLs). If you've tried to write more than basic mathematics in Lisp, you'll no doubt have wanted to write things like x+y*z or a*x^2 + b*x + c. I think many people who have just learned Lisp coming from other Algol style languages miss that expressiveness. They, like me, probably wanted a mathematics DSL. Well, now you've got one. MathP lets you write the above expressions within Common Lisp. MathP is a mathematics DSL.

MathP syntax attempts to retain a lot of the existing syntax of Common Lisp, while providing infix operators for mathematical notation. As a bonus, MathP syntax for function calls is vaguely similar to M-expressions, and there is a rudimentary macro system. More detail, including several examples, can be found in the documentation.

MathP is released under a BSD licence. It's been tested in Corman Common Lisp (on Windows).

[Edit: updated to version 1.1 - Support for backquote et. al.]
MathP Source Code
MathP Documentation (PDF) (original ODT)

To use it, download the source then load it with a call to load, something like this:
(load ".../path/to/MathP.lisp").

Here are some examples to try out (more can be found in the documentation and in the tests at the end of the code):
  • #M area := length * width
  • Positive root for a quadratic: #M x := (-b + sqrt(b^2 - 4*a*c)) / (2*a)
  • Local function and shared syntax: #M f(x)=x^2+1 mapcar(#'f '(1 2 3 4))
  • Factorial: #M defun fact(n) if n<=1 1 n*fact(n-1)
  • Naive Choose: #M defun choose(n k) fact(n)/fact(k)/fact(n-k)
  • Recursive Choose: #M defun choose(n k) {k=min(k n-k) prod(i res)=if i>0 prod(i-1 res*(n-k+i)/i) res  prod(k 1)}

1 comment:

  1. Fixed issue with #! handling. See the documentation for what #! does :-).

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