Common Lisp the Language, 2nd Edition


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2.12. Structures

Structures are instances of user-defined data types that have a fixed number of named components. They are analogous to records in Pascal. Structures are declared using the defstruct construct; defstruct automatically defines access and constructor functions for the new data type.

Different structures may print out in different ways; the definition of a structure type may specify a print procedure to use for objects of that type (see the :print-function option to defstruct). The default notation for structures is

#S(structure-name 
        slot-name-1 slot-value-1 
        slot-name-2 slot-value-2 
                      ...)

where #S indicates structure syntax, structure-name is the name (a symbol) of the structure type, each slot-name is the name (also a symbol) of a component, and each corresponding slot-value is the representation of the Lisp object in that slot.


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