[R] reading lisp file in R

Thu Jan 18 18:04:09 CET 2018

The file also has a bunch of email headers stuck in the middle of it:

.....

 (QUALITY-OF-LIFE SCALE:1-5 4)
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)
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>From LEBOWITZ at cs.columbia.edu Mon Feb 22 20:53:02 1988
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Date: Mon 18 Jan 88 20:13:54-EST
From: Michael Lebowitz <LEBOWITZ at CS.COLUMBIA.EDU>
Subject: bigger file part 3
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(DEF-INSTANCE GEORGETOWN
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....

Which dates it to 1988. Nice.

Barry

On Thu, Jan 18, 2018 at 9:20 AM, Peter Crowther <peter.crowther at melandra.com
> wrote:

> That's a nice example of why Lisp is both powerful and terrifying - you're
> looking at a Lisp *program*, not just Lisp *data*, as Lisp makes no
> distinction between the two.  You just read 'em in.
>
> The two definitions at the bottom are function definitions.  The top one
> defines the def-instance function.  Reading that indicates that it accepts
> an atom as a name and a list of key-value or key-range-value lists as
> properties, where they keys may be repeated to give you multi-valued
> attributes in your result.  The bottom one defines a function for removing
> duplicate entries of the same location.
>
> The rest of the file (apart from the included email headers) is a whole
> load of calls to the def-instance function.  In Lisp, you'd define the
> functions, then just run the rest of the file.
>
> To my knowledge, there is no generic way to read Lisp "data" into anything
> else, because of this quirk that data can look like anything.  If anyone
> can correct me on that, great, but I'd be somewhat surprised.  Therefore,
> as David intimated, the tools you need are generic tools for handling text,
> and you'll have to deal with the formatting yourself.  If I were doing a
> one-off transform of this file, I'd probably reach for vi... but I'm an old
> Unix hacker.  I certainly wouldn't teach that tooling.  awk or perl could
> certainly handle it; or if you want to give students a wider view of the
> world you might wish to try ANTLR and get them to write a grammar to parse
> the file.  The Clojure grammar (
> https://github.com/antlr/grammars-v4/blob/master/clojure/Clojure.g4) would
> be an interesting place to start, although Terence Parr's comment of "match
> a bunch of crap in parentheses" would probably give a flavour of what to
> implement.  Depends what else the students are learning.
>
> Hope this helps rather than hinders.
>
> - Peter
>
> On 18 January 2018 at 05:25, Ranjan Maitra <maitra at email.com> wrote:
>
> > Thanks! I am trying to use it in R. (Actually, I try to give my students
> > experiences with different kinds of files and I was wondering if there
> were
> > tools available for such kinds of files. I don't know Lisp so I do not
> > actually know what the lines towards the bottom of the file mean.(
> >
> > Many thanks for your response!
> >
> > Best wishes,
> > Ranjan
> >
> > On Wed, 17 Jan 2018 20:59:48 -0800 David Winsemius <
> dwinsemius at comcast.net>
> > wrote:
> >
> > >
> > > > On Jan 17, 2018, at 8:22 PM, Ranjan Maitra <maitra at email.com> wrote:
> > > >
> > > > Dear friends,
> > > >
> > > > Is there a way to read data files written in lisp into R?
> > > >
> > > > Here is the file: https://archive.ics.uci.edu/
> > ml/machine-learning-databases/university/university.data
> > > >
> > > > I would like to read it into R. Any suggestions?
> > >
> > > It's just a text file. What difficulties are you having?
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > Thanks very much in advance for pointers on this and best wishes,
> > > > Ranjan
> > > >
> > > > --
> > > > Important Notice: This mailbox is ignored: e-mails are set to be
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> > > > ______________________________________________
> > > > R-help at r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see
> > > > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> > > > PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/
> > posting-guide.html
> > > > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
> > >
> > > David Winsemius
> > > Alameda, CA, USA
> > >
> > > 'Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.'
> >  -Gehm's Corollary to Clarke's Third Law
> > >
> > > ______________________________________________
> > > R-help at r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see
> > > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> > > PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/
> > posting-guide.html
> > > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
> > >
> >
> >
> > --
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> > ______________________________________________
> > R-help at r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see
> > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> > PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/
> > posting-guide.html
> > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
> >
>
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>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/
> posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>

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