Loving PicoLisp

I've gone through a few PicoLisp phases, each very short -- a week or two. I would stumble around, grumble about its weirdnesses, and go back to Common Lisp.

However, it is tiny (~380KB - a bit bigger than I remember). It is plenty fast - loading the SpellBinding dictionary for maintenance, sorting it, or processing it to find potential games, takes way less than a second! With CL I actually had to work to get duplicate elimination to go under 10 seconds... So it's really just as good.

It is pretty portable. It took me minutes to make it compile under FreeBSD.

And it is a pure Lisp interpreter, which is fascinating all by itself. There are no datatypes other than atoms and conses!There is no compiling. Macros are arguably unnecessary; there are other, more direct ways to control argument evaluation and to manipulate code, including self-modification. All code is just sexps, just like data.

This time around, I find it highly usable (although I am still struggling with the built-in editor a bit). It also has a built-in database engine and a web server, if you are into that sort of things...

Posted in: s/Lisp

🚀 stack

2023-10-16 · 7 months ago · 👍 drh3xx, mike, pkitz

1 Comment

🚀 stack [OP] · Apr 04 at 16:44:

My comment was a little tongue-in-cheek...