A Common Lisp REPL on Android | Hacker News Reader

A Common Lisp REPL on Android

kvardek-du.kerno.org

74 pointszeveb19 comments

I have been using Termux and ECL. I'll have to look at this one. Another sort of REPL is installing Maxima on Android[1]. It is running on ECL. You get a Lisp-based Mathematica-like environment with a Lisp REPL of sorts.

  [1]  https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=jp.yhonda&hl=en

Very cool. This is based on ECL (Embeddable CL), which is one of the best and useful CL implementations.

BTW, Android already had Terminal IDE and Termux for years, two console emulators with prepackaged applications. In Termux you can install Picolisp via 1 command and all other options are buildable with either gcc (the hard way) or ecj + dx + dalvikvm (java toolchain, easy way). Written some small programs in JScheme using vim there, it was an ok experience.

Can you connect SLIME to this (or other) CL running on Android?

I don't see why not, so long as ECL on Android supports sockets. I'd be very, very, very careful about the security I used with it, though … you really don't want anyone on the Internet to get a Lisp REPL on your phone.

There are 2 ways to connect from Slime, see:

https://gitlab.com/eql/EQL5-Android/blob/master/examples/REP...

If you use the 2nd one (requires an SSH app), you should be fine.

(sorry for my lack of good formatting)

According to the creator yes [0]:

> > Trying to manually set the directory to /storage or /storage/1234-5678 hangs the application.

> Want to know a funny thing? In order to debug this, one can just run Swank from the app REPL (command :s) and then connect to the device from Emacs on the PC (see README[1]): now every condition will be shown in Slime on the PC, and can be inspected there!

> In this case the error message is:

> C operation (fread) signaled an error.

> C library explanation: Is a directory.

> which simply means that it tried to read a file, but found a directory instead. Now you simply can type q in Slime, and the app will continue to run!

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/7knbdo/cl_repl_on_pla...

[1] https://gitlab.com/eql/EQL5-Android/blob/master/examples/REP...

Sweet! As an otherwise happy iOS user, it continues to frustrate me that I can't get interpreters for my phone.

Well I can, I just have to compile and install them myself, which isn't a huge burden. But I have to write all the glue code myself.

Not Common Lisp, but there is a Shen interpreter on iOS.

https://chatolab.wordpress.com/2017/07/10/shen-programming-l...

Nice! Thanks.

Thanks for this - I've just installed it.

You can have interpreters, compilers are the real problem.

Depending on the Lisp system, it also can be work to get the runtime supporting iOS. For example LispWorks has a special garbage collector for 64bit iOS.

Look to clojure if you want a lisp on Android

But it starts slowly, doesn't it?

Also it's not as orthodoxal as CL :)

so? it's the same workflow and way of thinking.

Clojure has a very different workflow and way of thinking to CL, both technically and culturally.

I like both, but they take very different approaches to a lot of things (the most obvious of which is mutability).

you're splitting hairs. that is irrelevant.

Using vectors for grouping and lists for function/macro invocations vs. traditional s-expressions is irrelevant. Pretty much all the other differences between Clojure and CL are significant.

again, you're splitting hairs. that is almost irrelevant for someone that has never touched a lisp.

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