Mark Tarver wrote: > Interesting. At the risk of being labelled a troll, one thought that is occuring to me is that in Lisp it seems that sometimes it is difficult to achieve a simple thing in a simple way. To clarify ... recently, I had been trying to obtain md5 hashes of the files we had on our server (a different exercise than the one I mentioned in my OP, just in case you thought that I didn't understand the difference between encryption and hashing). There is an md5 package for Lisp available on the web, which I used with CLISP. I had a file that contained a non-standard character, causing CLISP to throw an error when it tried to print it.
Well, I suppose I could have tried to figure out a way to cajole CLISP into printing something it didn't want to print, but I was keen to give Corman Lisp 2.5 a try-out anyway, so I tried the package on it. EXCEPT, for some reason when you try to read a file with an :element-type of (unsigned-byte 8) (or something similar), Corman didn't like it. In the end, I hacked together an md5 DLL from some sources I found on the internet. You can get the package here, together with Corman Lisp bindings: http://www.markcarter.me.uk/computing/freeware/md5mc/md5mc.htm In the past, I had also employed a similar technique in order to get access to some console functions that I was interested in. My worry is that it seems to be a recurring theme with me ... get stumped in Lisp, realise that it is probably just plain easier in C, and then link the whole thing together in Lisp. Which is kinda less than expected. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list