
IsLisp: The ISO Lisp - brudgers
http://www.islisp.org/
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lispm
ISLisp is in many ways a simplified and slightly changed/extended Common Lisp.

See for example the object system, which works mostly like CLOS.

ISLisp is clearly in the tradition of Lisp 1, Lisp 1.5, Maclisp and Common
Lisp.

The spec is quite a bit shorter (134 pages) than the CL spec, but it contains
also much less detail about the various constructs. It is also object-
oriented, where the CL spec does also provide structures (a kind of records)
and then for, say conditions, does not say if they are implemented as
structures or classes. In most real Common Lisp implementations the choice has
been made to implement much of the data structures as classes - like what
ISLisp specifies. That means in practice in both CL implementations and in
ISLisp, conditions will be classes.

As such ISLisp is a nice and relatively clean old-school Lisp.

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fusiongyro
I believe the most commonly used implementation is OpenLisp:

[http://christian.jullien.free.fr/](http://christian.jullien.free.fr/)

There's also EuLisp:

[http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/~jeff/lisp/eulisp.html](http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/~jeff/lisp/eulisp.html)

I'd love to hear from someone who has tried either and can compare to Scheme,
CL or Clojure.

~~~
jwr
I wanted to, several years ago (between 2002-2004, in a commercial project,
embedded setting). It was quite good on paper, with a simplified specification
(compared to Common Lisp, which is huge) and several nice additions. I liked
the simple object system.

The problem was with the implementations — too few, too buggy, too few people
using it.

These days I would not bother with it, given that we have Clojure and its
approach to concurrency. In really small embedded environments I'd go with
something smaller than ISLisp, with an implementation that is easier to
understand and possibly fix if there is a problem.

~~~
6cxs2hd6
> These days I would not bother with it, given that we have Clojure

And Racket. And a variety of Scheme implementations.

The spirit/sentiment of ISLisp seems similar to traditional, pre RSR6 Scheme.
But I guess ISLisp would appeal if it's similar to some other, older Lisp
systems?

~~~
jwr
Yes, for small things I'd consider a Scheme — though I have to admit that
every time I tried to use Scheme, it turned out that doing relatively simple
real-world things (such as dealing with files or network) was unnecessarily
complex.

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enupten
Doesn't look like the ISO standard is used much. Is there something useful in
ISLisp which is not present in CL ? If there is no standard FFI interface,
threading model..., then why bother ?

