Here’s another clever trick. Don’t embed the data together with the logic, as I do with my directory aliases. Save it in a separate file and load it in using (read) .

Okay, it’s not that clever – I do it all the time in Perl using YAML and what-not. Slightly concerning, though, is that I didn’t automatically translate the knowledge gained from Perl to lisp. What was I thinking?

The code fragment is beautiful:

( defvar variable-name ) ( with-temp-buffer (insert-file-contents-literally <filename>) (setq variable-name (read (current-buffer))))