Everything Picolisp can do, and more

110 points by damir 3 months ago | 14 comments
  • mijoharas 3 months ago
    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).

    • lithos 3 months ago
      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.
      • anonzzzies 3 months ago
        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.
        • iLemming 3 months ago
          Are you sure you're not confusing Lisp with Haskell, because I'm not sure at all what the heck you're talking about.
      • tony-allan 3 months ago
        I initially confused this with Lisp for microcontrollers [1]

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

        • EncomLab 3 months ago
          uLisp is amazing - capable of leveraging a lot of work in a small package.
        • agumonkey 3 months ago
          Gotta admit, the author has a nice sense of eDSL https://picolisp.com/wiki/?taskDB
          • actionfromafar 3 months ago
            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.
            • BoingBoomTschak 3 months ago
              "No arrays nor floating point numbers" and "mainstream acceptance" don't live in the same world, in my eyes.

              Fexprs are cool, though.

              • actionfromafar 3 months ago
                Agreed, at least on the floats. I used PicoLisp in the past some, but I had to call C functions for floats.
                • jdougan 3 months ago
                  Fexprs are very cool. RIP John Shutt
              • Regenaxer 3 months ago
                No floats, yes, but it has fixnums with infinite precision
                • Paul-Craft 3 months ago
                  Nitpick: they're actually arbitrary precision. There's no such thing as "infinite" precision on a real machine. This does actually matter on occasion.
                • Archit3ch 3 months ago
                  I love it, but no floats is a practical limitation.