
LYSP (a really tiny lisp) - jacquesm
http://www.piumarta.com/software/lysp/
======
yan
God, seeing straight C programs that don't use any superfluous libraries or
stupid coding tricks that just obscure the intent of the programmer is so
refreshing. Just one C file that anyone with a barely working knowledge of C
can understand and a very clear Lisp implementation.

Just don't try to learn C from it; code is saturated with boundless copying
into stack buffers.

~~~
mahmud
check this one out :-D

<http://www.modeemi.fi/~chery/lisp500/lisp500c99.c>

~~~
yan
Is that an IOCCC entry?

Off topic: are you still in the NOVA area or overseas?

~~~
mahmud
Not and IOCCC entry; just something Lispers carry with them when heading
towards obscure and very small territories. You might like XCL better:
<http://armedbear.org/> has a native optimizing compiler and compiles to ~5MB
for compiler + runtime.

I live in Australia now, mate. Sydney. It's like D.C. but with a beach, nicer
beer, better public transport and laid back people :-)

~~~
Flow
And fricking sharks!

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avibryant
I smiled at the last two lines of his test file:

(define exit (dlsym "exit")) (exit 0)

Certainly no need to define exit any earlier than that...

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stcredzero
Someone should take stuff like this and make a _Really Compact_ Netbook/Tablet
OS. Such a device could undercut competitors by requiring 1/50th the
resources. An instant-on grayscale tablet "Moleskine" that just worked and had
a gorgeous trans-reflective screen would rule. (Haiku OS might be a better
starting point.)

~~~
shaunxcode
Lately I have been showing a lot of younger kids how to program in scheme.
This means I have been setting up a lot of older laptops with linux + dr
scheme as that is the ideal environment for books like the little schemer, how
to design programs etc. I have to say that it feels like there should be a
MUCH lighter way to accomplish this. I understand dr scheme can do a lot of
cool graphical stuff too but I would LOVE it if there was a linux distro that
had nothing except for a lisp/scheme interpreter like this + ncurses dr scheme
type interface. This way it would run on next to nothing hardware and not run
into so many strange hic-ups w/ x on spurious hardware.

A moleskine tablet like you mention with an external rollout keyboard would be
so ideal. I'm not asking for a lisp-all-the-way-down (well I would like that
too) OS but it would be rad if someone rolled a x-less version of ubuntu or
what not w/ the exclusive purpose of teaching/learning scheme.

~~~
dkersten
Arch Linux is a nicely stripped down linux distro. Provided you could find or
write a nice ncurses interface for scheme, you could probably build such a
system on top of Arch.

I use Arch and Musca (a relatively new, very minimal tiling window manager) on
an eee pc 1000 HE and it works extremely well.

------
jwecker
I've used this library a few times for similar (not as good and not good
enough to show off) fun- it works beautifully: <http://sexpr.sourceforge.net>

------
z8000
I know only the very basics of LISP but this to my untrained eye looks rather
neat!

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geocar
A correction: These aren't macros, they're fexprs.

There are a lot of other interesting things on the site; the cola/idst stuff
is especially interesting.

~~~
toadpipe
The gold box/pepsi/coke/cola/jolt/id/idst/soda languages are indeed
interesting, but from the outside of VPRI it isn't easy to figure out what
they do. Listening to Alan Kay try to summarize it in a few minutes
(<http://irbseminars.intel-research.net/>) makes it sound like even he doesn't
understand it very well.

Piumarta seems to be a very sharp guy, but it's strange that a software
project that is supposed to radically simplify the software stack still
doesn't appear to have a working prototype of a complete two-kernel
(pepsi+coke) system, almost five years after the albert paper
(<http://piumarta.com/papers/albert.pdf>) that sketched out the basics was
written. Kay keeps talking about how cool it is, and Piumarta has given at
least one talk about how cool it is
(<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cn7kTPbW6QQ>), but as far as I can tell it
doesn't even exist yet. There are working pieces (which are each tens of
thousands of lines of code), but from the outside there doesn't appear to be a
working pepsi+coke system yet, let alone iterations on it. The VPRI progress
reports don't even mention it.

VPRI seems all over the place, and Kay is talking about objects with AI-
complete interfaces now. The mailing list is dead, and the wiki is pretty much
dead. There's more information on Piumarta's personal website than anywhere
else. I know it's supposed to be blue sky research, but it still seems weird.

My impression of the whole thing is that "complete" reflection/self-
description is not a good foundation for minimalistic systems.

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brianobush
the ifdef'd main in gc.c has bit rot a bit and segfaults, otherwise nice and
simple.

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capablanca
Ugh, why software rottens?

