Tuesday 5 February 2008

The 'pre Arc' Arc

Seeing that arc is the word on everyones lips I thought I'd take a quick peek.

In Summary.
- data in the functional position is interesting.
- [] function syntax is neat (and almost as nice as the #L syntax in iterate)
- foo:bar for function composition reads quite nicely (once you get out of the CL mindset)

The rest is kind of 'meh' and then i realized, wait a second, a Lisp1 with more Lisp than Scheme and unhygienic macros,  I've seen that before and I had, it is called rep.  This is the Lisp that powers sawfish which (and someone correct me if I'm wrong) was the default window manager for GNOME for quite some time.

This was actually the Lisp that I cut my teeth on way back in 2001 (Grief, I can't believe it was that long ago)  and looking back on it brings back some fond memories and reminds me how full featured it was (especially for something at version 0.17), to list some of them:

  • Profiler
  • Module system (modelled on Scheme48)
  • Tail call elimination
  • Byte Compiled
  • First class Continuations
  • Regexes
  • Threading
  • Good access to OS 
  • Ability to load .so files
  • Bindings to mysql
  • Built in documentation via the ,desc operator

and Most importantly it has apropos, god knows why arc is missing this.

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