Over the last weeks I have been working on my moldable inspector for Common Lisp again, with the goal of turning it into a support platform for explainable data science. One big task that I have finally achieved is code browsing. You can navigate through the code by clicking on symbols in displayed code. And you can transclude code into HTML, as shown on the first pane. This wasn't trivial to do because Common Lisp cannot be statically parsed. When loading code, Lisp reads one top-level form (everything between a top-level pair of parentheses), executes it, and then goes on to the next one. The semantics of each form thus depend on the previous ones. Static parsing, as I do here, can never be perfect. The goal is getting the parser to deal with 99% of code correctly and not crash on the remaining 1%. Fortunately, others had done most of the hard work, and I could use Eclector, a portable and extensible Common Lisp reader, as the basis for my code browser. The code for my demo available on Codeberg.

Beautiful!

A small step in terms of coding, but a big step towards my goal of moldable data science: plotting support in my moldable inspector for Common Lisp. It wasn't that much coding because most of the hard work is done by Plotly.js. Other than embedding it into my inspector views, the main work for me was implementing a few Lisp macros that provide a nice lispy syntax for the JSON data structures that Plotly expects as input.