CL-LOCATIVES ============ By Robert Smith Locatives are the Lisp equivalent of pointers, minus the arithmetic. In Lisp terms, they make the concept of "places" first-class. The main API consists of the macro LOCATIVE-FOR, which takes as an argument a place, as you would give to SETF; and the function DEREFERENCE, which extracts the value of that place, and (SETF DEREFERENCE), which sets the value of that place. The following example pretty much sums up the API: (let* ((x (make-array 5 :initial-element 0)) (l (locative-for (aref x 2)))) (setf (dereference l) 5) (list l x (dereference l))) gives (#<LOCATIVE {100612B943}> #(0 0 5 0 0) 5) as a result. We also have LOCATIVEP, and you can funcall the LOCATIVE-WRITER of a locative if you need to deal with multiple values (a rare case). This code can be very useful for porting over C code which uses pointers and by-reference values a lot.