clog-moldable-inspector

A moldable Common Lisp object inspector based on CLOG. The inspector is thus shown in a Web browser.

Warning: this package is in active development. Many details are likely to change in the future. I am not making any promises about backwards compatibility at this time.

Dependencies

You can install clog-moldable-inspector from Ultralisp. If you prefer a more manual installation, here is the list of dependencies:

• clog, which you can install via Quicklisp or by any other means you may prefer.
• clog-ace, which you should get directly from GitHub because the inspector depends on recent additions to it.
• html-inspector-views, which defines the (small) infrastructure for defining views and also most of the views used by the inspector. Separate systems and packages for view definitions avoid making clog-moldable-inspector and thus clog dependencies of every piece of code that implements custom views.

Usage

(asdf:load-system :clog-moldable-inspector)
(clog-moldable-inspector:tutorial)

Examples of view definitions

html-inspector-views contains many views for data types from the Common Lisp standard (lists, vectors, hash tables, pathnames, systems, packages, etc.). The names of view definitions have a common prefix (the "eyes" emoji 👀), so they are easy to spot.

My malleable-message-manager has views for various Mastodon data types in the file inspector-views.lisp.

Motivation

While this is a generic Common Lisp object inspector, much like Clouseau), my motivation for developing it is more specific: I want to make it easier to present computer-aided research with a large cognitive surface. In more familiar terms, I want to empower scientists to share their code, data, and associated narratives in a way that makes them comprehensible to their peers.

For a simple example, see ratp-points-of-sale.

License

BSD

Acknowledgment

This inspector is heavily influenced by the moldable inspector in Glamorous Toolkit.