Hacker News Reader

Comment by qwertyuiop924 | Hacker News Reader

Picolisp can match it in dynamism.

Seriously, Picolisp is absolutely insane.

I just read a bit of documentation from the Picolisp page. It looks really cool, but can it reach arbitrarily far up the call stack? That's the quality of tcl that I don't see other places. The capabilities of 'upvar' and 'uplevel'.

[Edit] I should say "one of the qualities." The other important one is that Tcl has no types. Even all the lisps I know have types.

>The other important one is that Tcl has no types.

Is it that it has no types or that everything is a string? asking, not stating.

Yes, everything is a string. But you can pass data around anywhere you like without worrying about coercing. A command will receive its data in string representation and treat it however it likes. So when you go to do math with the 'expr' command, 'expr' will treat its arguments as numbers.

    set x 5
    expr { $x + 3 }

'expr' receives x as the string 5 but knows to treat it as an int.

I'm not sure that's a great explanation. Maybe a decent summary of the concept of 'no types' is "the language does not presume to tell you how you can or cannot use your data."

Thanks. Yes, I get it. I had read part of the Ousterhout book. And also Don Libes' Expect book uses Tcl, since Expect is written in it. Had read a lot of that too. Both very good ones. Didn't get to use Tcl in projects though. I'd read some years ago that Tcl was used heavily in the electronics / EDA industry.

The functions you're looking for are called `up` and `run` in picolisp.

And before you ask, yes, picolisp has list interpolation (or quasiquoting, in lisp parlance), so you can control which parts of a certain chunk of code will be run when, and in which contexts. It also includes the `macro` fexpr, which makes interpolation more convenient.

Wow, very interesting. Thanks for pointing out picolisp!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com