Everything Picolisp can do, and more | Hacker News Reader

Everything Picolisp can do, and more

picolisp.com

110 pointsdamir14 comments

So, one thing I'm not seeing obviously in this list of articles (which seem great in general!) is an explanation of how picolisp contrasts to other lisps? Something explaining why I might reach for picolisp instead of, say, scheme or common lisp?

Can anyone share something showing that, or explaining a little bit more about picolisp for someone unfamiliar with it? (I thought the pros/cons list on the page might describe it a little more, but it didn't make things immediately clear to me).

Yeah LISP has major issues of "that's neat, what happens when you try IO". Anything from drawing on the screen, connecting to a socket, or even nonterminal keyboard input ends up being such a pain.

Not talking about pico as i don't have experience with it, but not sure what you mean in relation to something like common lisp or racket? Those things you mention are trivial in both. I know racket is more scheme than lisp.

Are you sure you're not confusing Lisp with Haskell, because I'm not sure at all what the heck you're talking about.

I initially confused this with Lisp for microcontrollers [1]

[1] http://www.ulisp.com/show?3J

uLisp is amazing - capable of leveraging a lot of work in a small package.

Gotta admit, the author has a nice sense of eDSL https://picolisp.com/wiki/?taskDB

PicoLisp is like an ancient technology or species which somehow survived to this day. It always felt to me like on the cusp to mainstream acceptance.

"No arrays nor floating point numbers" and "mainstream acceptance" don't live in the same world, in my eyes.

Fexprs are cool, though.

Agreed, at least on the floats. I used PicoLisp in the past some, but I had to call C functions for floats.

Fexprs are very cool. RIP John Shutt

No floats, yes, but it has fixnums with infinite precision

Nitpick: they're actually arbitrary precision. There's no such thing as "infinite" precision on a real machine. This does actually matter on occasion.

I love it, but no floats is a practical limitation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com