Robert A. Uhl

I’ve got my solutions to today’s puzzles up. Believe it or not, a lot of folks dislike LOOP because it’s not terribly Lispy — they’re right, of course, but it is a pretty handy Swiss Army knife to keep in one’s pocket.

I use hash tables a lot, but that’s because hash tables are an awesome data structure. My biggest takeaway from working on these puzzles so far is gratitude that Common Lisp is a large enough language that it has hash tables; were I writing in C I’d either be scanning & rescanning & re-rescanning strings, or I’d have to write my own hash table implementation.

This is something I think modern languages have down pat: hash tables are table stakes to be taken seriously. Heck, Lua is basically nothing but hash tables!