It appears that the Kate editor has a lot of xml files describing various languages, for highlighting purposes. For example, commonlisp.xml contains all 978 standard Common Lisp symbols. Other projects depends on these files, like Skylighting in Haskell and then indirectly matterhorn.

I was wondering about passing a string to check the existence of a symbol, so I created the following function,
but all the answers were :INTERNAL, so it was useless.
I understand the reason, but does anyone know why lisp works this way?

I’ve been working on processing a large amount of files with lisp and encountering an issue listing directory contents when there are millions of files in a directory.

Here’s my issue:

In lisp, I would like to write a macro for loop without using the loop function in lisp which imitates a for loop in C or Java. I’d like to achieve this with only the basic lisp syntax.