An Extension of ACOS-LISP (Part II)

Functions for doing input and output tend to be given short shrift in LISP, and this is the case with ACOS-LISP as well. But those functions are important especially when one intends to build a system in which user interaction is needed and information needs to be displayed legibly. As for output functions used for editing, the original version of ACOS-LISP has essentially only one built-in function, PRIN1,that moves information to the output buffer. But PRIN1 deals only with atoms. So I intend to augment ACOS-LISP with output functions to edit any type of S-expressions by making use of the output buffer. Prior to it, however, I had to define several basic stringmanipulation functions to treat the S-expressions, because they are also lacking. Thus, this report gives first a brief analysis of bad circumstances of original ACOS-LISP with respect to string manipulation and then gives the basic functions to cope with it. Introduction of several output functions to ACOS-LISP follow together with several other useful functions, such as for data-type definition, data-driven programming, list processing, and controlling. Definitions of the newly introduced functions are also given, though not in full.