Conditionals Control Structure Iteration

5.5: Blocks and Exits

Common Lisp blocks provide a non-local exit mechanism very similar to catch and throw, but lexically rather than dynamically scoped. This package actually implements block in terms of catch; however, the lexical scoping allows the optimizing byte-compiler to omit the costly catch step if the body of the block does not actually return-from the block.

Special Form: block name forms...

The forms are evaluated as if by a progn. However, if any of the forms execute (return-from name), they will jump out and return directly from the block form. The block returns the result of the last form unless a return-from occurs.

The block/return-from mechanism is quite similar to the catch/throw mechanism. The main differences are that block names are unevaluated symbols, rather than forms (such as quoted symbols) which evaluate to a tag at run-time; and also that blocks are lexically scoped whereas catch/throw are dynamically scoped. This means that functions called from the body of a catch can also throw to the catch, but the return-from referring to a block name must appear physically within the forms that make up the body of the block. They may not appear within other called functions, although they may appear within macro expansions or lambdas in the body. Block names and catch names form independent name-spaces.

In true Common Lisp, defun and defmacro surround the function or expander bodies with implicit blocks with the same name as the function or macro. This does not occur in Emacs Lisp, but this package provides defun* and defmacro* forms which do create the implicit block.

The Common Lisp looping constructs defined by this package, such as loop and dolist, also create implicit blocks just as in Common Lisp.

Because they are implemented in terms of Emacs Lisp catch and throw, blocks have the same overhead as actual catch constructs (roughly two function calls). However, Zawinski and Furuseth's optimizing byte compiler (standard in Emacs 19) will optimize away the catch if the block does not in fact contain any return or return-from calls that jump to it. This means that do loops and defun* functions which don't use return don't pay the overhead to support it.

Special Form: return-from name [result]

This macro returns from the block named name, which must be an (unevaluated) symbol. If a result form is specified, it is evaluated to produce the result returned from the block. Otherwise, nil is returned.

Special Form: return [result]

This macro is exactly like (return-from nil result). Common Lisp loops like do and dolist implicitly enclose themselves in nil blocks.

Conditionals

Control Structure

Iteration