colliflower

Colliflower is a set of generic interfaces for lisp collections.

The full documentation can be found here.

Colliflower has four components:

1. liter
2. garten
3. silo
4. colliflower

Each of these components are described below.

liter

Liter provides an abstraction and tools for iterators.

A liter iterator is simply a function which returns the next value with each invocation and signals and end of iteration with an ITERATION-ENDED condition.

A liter iterable is any object for which there is a method defined for the GET-ITERATOR generic function. An iterator (or more generally a function) is an iterable whose iterator is itself. The LITER package provides GET-ITERATOR methods for lists, vectors, hash-tables, streams, and arrays, as well as functions to get iterators over those structures in different ways (such as treating lists as plists or alists, or iterating over the lines of a character stream).

Liter also provides:

• macros to iterate over an iterator (or iterable), including a driver for

the ITERATE library

• functions to generate abstract and potentially infinite iterators (including iterators that count, repeat, and cycle)
• Several functions that perform operations on iterators, such as mapping, filtering, folding,

zipping, etc. similar to the itertools library in python.

• An abstract ITER-OBJECT class that can be used for iterators with complex state.

garten

Garten provides a generic abstraction for building new data structures. It is a more generic form of the COLLECTING macro.

The core of garten is the concept of a "grower". A grower is an object that stores the state of a collection while it is being built. The grower itself may or may not be the final result. For example: the grower for a list may keep handles for both the head and tail of the list to efficiently append elements, or the grower for an immutable data structure may itself be mutable.

The basic interface for garten consists of three generic functions:

1. MAKE-GROWER creates a new grower for some type. Note that the TYPE argument is

the type of the final data structure, not the type of the grower. 2. FEED adds an item to the grower, which will eventually be part of the final structure. 3. FRUIT retrieves the final result of the grower. In general it is not safe to call FRUIT, FEED, or RESET-GROWER after FRUIT has been called for a grower, as doing so may mutate the result returned by previous calls to FRUIT.

Garten defines the above interface for lists, plists, vectors, hash-tables, strings, etc. Garten also provides WITH-GROWER which is similar to the oft-implemented COLLECTING macro, and a GROWING directive for the iterate library.

silo

Silo provides a generic way to access and set values of data structures by a key. The key may be a normal key, or an index.

colliflower

Colliflower is brings the four above components together. The colliflower package exports all of the public symbols from liter, garten, and silo and provides a few additional tools that combine functionality from the packages.