Practical Common Lisp

           :define-binary-type
           :read-value
           :write-value
           :*in-progress-objects*
           :parent-of-type
           :current-binary-object
           :+null+))

The COM.GIGAMONKEYS.MACRO-UTILITIES package contains the with- gensyms and once-only macros from Chapter 8.

Since you already have a handwritten version of the code you want to generate, it shouldn't be too hard to write such a macro. Just take it in small pieces, starting with a version of define-binary-class that generates just the DEFCLASS form.

If you look back at the define-binary-class form, you'll see that it takes two arguments, the name id3-tag and a list of slot specifiers, each of which is itself a two-item list. From those pieces you need to build the appropriate DEFCLASS form. Clearly, the biggest difference between the define-binary-class form and a proper DEFCLASS form is in the slot specifiers. A single slot specifier from define-binary-class looks something like this:

(major-version u1)

But that's not a legal slot specifier for a DEFCLASS. Instead, you need something like this:

(major-version :initarg :major-version :accessor major-version)

Easy enough. First define a simple function to translate a symbol to the corresponding keyword symbol.

(defun as-keyword (sym) (intern (string sym) :keyword))

Now define a function that takes a define-binary-class slot specifier and returns a DEFCLASS slot specifier.

(defun slot->defclass-slot (spec)
  (let ((name (first spec)))
    `(,name :initarg ,(as-keyword name) :accessor ,name)))

You can test this function at the REPL after switching to your new package with a call to IN- PACKAGE.

BINARY-DATA> (slot->defclass-slot '(major-version u1))
(MAJOR-VERSION :INITARG :MAJOR-VERSION :ACCESSOR MAJOR-VERSION)

Looks good. Now the first version of define-binary-class is trivial.

(defmacro define-binary-class (name slots)
  `(defclass ,name ()
     ,(mapcar #'slot->defclass-slot slots)))

This is simple template-style macro—define-binary-class generates a DEFCLASS form by interpolating the name of the class and a list of slot specifiers constructed by applying slot->defclass-slot to each element of the list of slots specifiers from the define-binary-class form.

To see exactly what code this macro generates, you can evaluate this expression at the REPL.

(macroexpand-1 '(define-binary-class id3-tag
  ((identifier      (iso-8859-1-string :length 3))
   (major-version   u1)
   (revision        u1)
   (flags           u1)
   (size            id3-tag-size)
   (frames          (id3-frames :tag-size size)))))

The result, slightly reformatted here for better readability, should look familiar since it's exactly the class definition you wrote by hand earlier:

(defclass id3-tag ()
  ((identifier      :initarg :identifier    :accessor identifier)
   (major-version   :initarg :major-version :accessor major-version)
   (revision        :initarg :revision      :accessor revision)
   (flags           :initarg :flags         :accessor flags)
   (size            :initarg :size          :accessor size)
   (frames          :initarg :frames        :accessor frames)))

Reading Binary Objects

Next you need to make define-binary-class also generate a function that can read an instance of the new class. Looking back at the read-id3-tag function you wrote before, this seems a bit trickier, as the read-id3-tag wasn't quite so regular—to read each slot's value, you had to call a different function. Not to mention, the name of the function, read-id3-tag, while derived from the name of the class you're defining, isn't one of the arguments to define-binary-class and thus isn't available to be interpolated into a template the way the class name was.

You could deal with both of those problems by devising and following a naming convention so the macro can figure out the name of the function to call based on the name of the type in the slot specifier. However, this would require define-binary-class to generate the name read-id3-tag, which is possible but a bad idea. Macros that create global definitions should generally use only names passed to them by their callers; macros that generate names under the covers can cause hard-to-predict—and hard-to-debug—name conflicts when the generated names happen to be the same as names used elsewhere.[267]

You can avoid both these inconveniences by noticing that all the functions that read a particular type of value have the same fundamental purpose, to read a value of a specific type from a stream. Speaking colloquially, you might say they're all instances of a single generic operation. And the colloquial use of the word generic should lead you directly to the solution to your problem: instead of defining a bunch of independent functions, all with different names, you can define a single generic function, read- value, with methods specialized to read different types of values.

That is, instead of defining functions read-iso-8859-1-string and read-u1, you can define read-value as a generic function taking two required arguments, a type and a stream, and possibly some keyword arguments.

(defgeneric read-value (type stream &key)
  (:documentation 'Read a value of the given type from the stream.'))

By specifying &key without any actual keyword parameters, you allow different methods to define their own &key parameters without requiring them to do so. This does mean every method specialized on read-value will have to include either &key or an &rest parameter in its parameter list to be compatible with the generic function.

Then you'll define methods that use EQL specializers to specialize the type argument on the name of the type you want to read.

(defmethod read-value ((type (eql 'iso-8859-1-string)) in &key length) ...)
(defmethod read-value ((type (eql 'u1)) in &key) ...)

Then you can make define-binary-class generate a read-value method specialized on the type name id3-tag, and that method can be implemented in terms of calls to