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The Common Lisp Metaspec

The Common Lisp Metaspec

Jun 24, 2026 Developer Tools
common-lisp documentation parser specification

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The Common Lisp Metaspec

About

I started this project back in 2015, to translate the TeX original specification into an easily parsed format (s-doc), and to create an HTML rendering of that format as a proof of concept.The project is homed here: https://codeberg.org/dlowe/metaspectre/Differences from the Hyperspec (from the README): - Most importantly, it is free to modify and distribute. - The original TeX is very hard to parse and use for things other than generating a printed copy. The Hyperspec is an HTML rendering which can be parsed as HTML, but loses a lot of information. The Metaspec has an easily parsed intermediate form that can be used for all kinds of purposes, like converting into lookups. - Math equations are rendered using MathML. - Includes the acknowledgements and appendix sections. - Uses progressively enhanced Javascript to provide search and light/dark theme switching. - Incorporates over 145 patches for content, using corrections accumulated over the years, and documented in the errata page. - Includes TeX comments, which can contain interesting historical data. - Includes links and identifiers to bibliographical references.

Comments (5)

Orrin Hickle Orrin Hickle 2 weeks ago

what parser survived nine years of turning tex into something sane

Jermain Kovacek Jermain Kovacek 2 weeks ago

HTML rendering looks super clean for a spec translation

Barbara Quitzon Barbara Quitzon 2 weeks ago

finally someone made the spec actually parseable

Colin Price Colin Price 1 week ago

adoption must be brutal for something this niche

Halle Bogisich Halle Bogisich 1 week ago

spec as data is peak lisp recursion