Peter Siebel - Practical Common Lisp

(let ((count 0))

(list

#'(lambda () (incf count))

#'(lambda () (decf count))

#'(lambda () count)))

Lexically scoped bindings help keep code understandable by limiting the scope, literally, in which a given name has meaning. This is why most modern languages use lexical scoping for local variables. Sometimes, however, you really want a global variable—a variable that you can refer to from anywhere in your program. While it's true that indiscriminate use of global variables can turn code into spaghetti nearly as quickly as unrestrained use of goto, global variables do have legitimate uses and exist in one form or another in almost every programming language. [73] Java disguises global variables as public static fields, C uses extern variables, and Python's module-level and Perl's package-level variables can likewise be accessed from anywhere. And as you'll see in a moment, Lisp's version of global variables, dynamic variables, are both more useful and more manageable.

Common Lisp provides two ways to create global variables: DEFVAR and DEFPARAMETER . Both forms take a variable name, an initial value, and an optional documentation string. After it has been DEFVAR ed or DEFPARAMETER ed, the name can be used anywhere to refer to the current binding of the global variable. As you've seen in previous chapters, global variables are conventionally named with names that start and end with *. You'll see later in this section why it's quite important to follow that naming convention. Examples of DEFVAR and DEFPARAMETER look like this:

(defvar *count* 0

"Count of widgets made so far.")

(defparameter *gap-tolerance* 0.001

"Tolerance to be allowed in widget gaps.")

The difference between the two forms is that DEFPARAMETER always assigns the initial value to the named variable while DEFVAR does so only if the variable is undefined. A DEFVAR form can also be used with no initial value to define a global variable without giving it a value. Such a variable is said to be unbound .

Practically speaking, you should use DEFVAR to define variables that will contain data you'd want to keep even if you made a change to the source code that uses the variable. For instance, suppose the two variables defined previously are part of an application for controlling a widget factory. It's appropriate to define the *count*variable with DEFVAR because the number of widgets made so far isn't invalidated just because you make some changes to the widget-making code. [74] If you specifically want to reset a DEFVAR ed variable, you can either set it directly with SETF or make it unbound using MAKUNBOUND and then reevaluate the DEFVAR form.

On the other hand, the variable *gap-tolerance*presumably has some effect on the behavior of the widget-making code itself. If you decide you need a tighter or looser tolerance and change the value in the DEFPARAMETER form, you'd like the change to take effect when you recompile and reload the file.

After defining a variable with DEFVAR or DEFPARAMETER , you can refer to it from anywhere. For instance, you might define this function to increment the count of widgets made:

(defun increment-widget-count () (incf *count*))

The advantage of global variables is that you don't have to pass them around. Most languages store the standard input and output streams in global variables for exactly this reason—you never know when you're going to want to print something to standard out, and you don't want every function to have to accept and pass on arguments containing those streams just in case someone further down the line needs them.

However, once a value, such as the standard output stream, is stored in a global variable and you have written code that references that global variable, it's tempting to try to temporarily modify the behavior of that code by changing the variable's value.

For instance, suppose you're working on a program that contains some low-level logging functions that print to the stream in the global variable *standard-output*. Now suppose that in part of the program you want to capture all the output generated by those functions into a file. You might open a file and assign the resulting stream to *standard-output*. Now the low-level functions will send their output to the file.

This works fine until you forget to set *standard-output*back to the original stream when you're done. If you forget to reset *standard-output*, all the other code in the program that uses *standard-output*will also send its output to the file. [75] The strategy of temporarily reassigning *standard-output* also breaks if the system is multithreaded—if there are multiple threads of control trying to print to different streams at the same time, they'll all try to set the global variable to the stream they want to use, stomping all over each other. You could use a lock to control access to the global variable, but then you're not really getting the benefit of multiple concurrent threads, since whatever thread is printing has to lock out all the other threads until it's done even if they want to print to a different stream.

What you really want, it seems, is a way to wrap a piece of code in something that says, "All code below here—all the functions it calls, all the functions they call, and so on, down to the lowest-level functions—should use this value for the global variable *standard-output*." Then when the high-level function returns, the old value of *standard-output*should be automatically restored.

It turns out that that's exactly what Common Lisp's other kind of variable—dynamic variables—let you do. When you bind a dynamic variable—for example, with a LET variable or a function parameter—the binding that's created on entry to the binding form replaces the global binding for the duration of the binding form. Unlike a lexical binding, which can be referenced by code only within the lexical scope of the binding form, a dynamic binding can be referenced by any code that's invoked during the execution of the binding form. [76] The technical term for the interval during which references may be made to a binding is its extent . Thus, scope and extent are complementary notions—scope refers to space while extent refers to time. Lexical variables have lexical scope but indefinite extent, meaning they stick around for an indefinite interval, determined by how long they're needed. Dynamic variables, by contrast, have indefinite scope since they can be referred to from anywhere but dynamic extent. To further confuse matters, the combination of indefinite scope and dynamic extent is frequently referred to by the misnomer dynamic scope . And it turns out that all global variables are, in fact, dynamic variables.

Thus, if you want to temporarily redefine *standard-output*, the way to do it is simply to rebind it, say, with a LET .

(let ((*standard-output* *some-other-stream*))