A site for Picolisp, a very true Lisp

I'm highly skeptical.<p>An interpreter-only implementation that performs better than compiled implementations?... Oh, but wait, it says it's better than "some" compiled implementations, so I guess if it beats "some" shitty compiled implementations that's true... How does it compare to, say, SBCL?<p>As for the "As a consequence [of being interpreter-only], Pico Lisp is the most dynamic Lisp in existence today." part, I don't really see what notable advantages an interpreter-only implementation would have over a <i>proper</i> compiler-implementation in flexibility, given that it's Lisp we're talking about. Unless you wanted to muck with the deep internals or something... Also, I'm in the process of making my homebrewed web framework <i>more</i> flexible by making use of <i>more</i> compilation, thus making it <i>less</i> of an interpreter.

Regarding the quote below... I don't get it. Cells are a linked list spread randomly throughout your address space. Processors don't love that at all.<p>"A cell is a cell in the same way it was with the original Lisp, consisting on a head and the rest, that is, a CAR part (which may be either a number, a symbol, or a pointer to another cell), and a CDR part (also a number, symbol or cell). As a consequence, it is incredibly memory efficient, and there is little to none memory fragmentation. Processors cache "loves" our interpreter."

Gee, what a great interpreter to embed in a program... that's GPLed. Nice option for that niche, I suppose.

Picolisp was a major inspiration for me to start writing my own lisp --- I love the idea of removing lambda in favor of quote. I was constantly frustrated by the dynamic binding, though, and the lack of idiomatic macros --- I guess you can't have everything you want unless you do it yourself.

Uh, a small warning, some of the functions in picolisp are a bit "buggy" or at least I wouldn't use them: <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1630352/picolisp-language-onoff-question/1652986#1652986" rel="nofollow">http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1630352/picolisp-language...</a>

For some values of true.<p>While PicoLisp is certainly interesting, the bulk of Lisp and Scheme (and Dylan) implementations since the early 1980's have gone into a different direction.<p>For me, true Lisps are languages like T, EuLisp, Dylan, Goo and CL of course (their kernels are mostly equivalent, and can be compiled to run well on existing (virtual) machines.)

I have a copy of an great-but-ancient book called "Functional Programming: Application and Implementation" (Peter Henderson, edited by CAR Hoare).<p>If you're interested in this implementation, you'll find that book very interesting, and quite similar I think (based on reading the link).<p>(The book has a now-amusing appendix too where it lists the "object" code for the compiler in sexp-syntax, presuming that you'd have no other way to bootstrap other than typing that in :)

Also check out the author's site for picolisp: <a href="http://www.software-lab.de/down.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.software-lab.de/down.html</a>

"Pilog -- PicoLisp Prolog"<p>I see it obeys the law that every Lisp implementation must have an implementation of Prolog embedded in it.

No (non-Cygwin) Windows binary :-(