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newLISP v.10.7.4 Development Release

newlisp.org

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Re: newLISP v.10.7.4 Development Release

#2
newLISP is a Lisp-like, general-purpose scripting language. It is especially well-suited for applications in AI, simulation, natural language processing, big data, machine learning and statistics. Because of its small resource requirements, newLISP is excellent for embedded systems applications. Most of the functions you will ever need are already built in. This includes networking functions, support for distributed and multicore processing, and Bayesian statistics.

Now I can train a neural net to calculate the probability that a distributed computation will fail without having to type `require`.

NewLISP looks interesting.

Re: newLISP v.10.7.4 Development Release

#4
I find it interesting that they positon newlisp as being "for embedded systems", because from everything I've read it requires a Unix system to run on.

Anyone here running newlisp on a microcontroller or similar and able to comment?

Re: newLISP v.10.7.4 Development Release

#5
post #2

newLISP is a Lisp-like, general-purpose scripting language. It is especially well-suited for applications in AI, simulation, natural language processing, big data, machine learning and statistics. Because of its small resource requirements, newLISP is excellent for embedded systems applications. Most of the functions you will ever need are already built in. This includes networking functions, support for distributed…

I worked with Lutz, the primary developer, briefly in 2006. I used NewLISP for a few years after that, mostly for distributed computing with net-eval(). I briefly tried using it as a systems programming language where one might have reached for Perl or the then-up-and-coming Ruby or Python. If you like lispy languages, you'll probably enjoy playing with it.

Re: newLISP v.10.7.4 Development Release

#6
post #4

I find it interesting that they positon newlisp as being "for embedded systems", because from everything I've read it requires a Unix system to run on. Anyone here running newlisp on a microcontroller or similar and able to comment?

It's been a while since I used it on "embedded systems" but in our case it was running on top of OpenWRT and OpenBSD on appliance-like SOC systems (think of Soekris and Mikrotik), not directly on microcontrollers.

Re: newLISP v.10.7.4 Development Release

#7
newLISP was the butt of half the jokes on #scheme over a decade ago. I'm surprised it had enough uptake to stick around. Uniquely for a Lisp, all objects are deep-copied by value when passed around. It also doesn't have closures. To get around these and other limitations, it has a notion of contexts that are auto-dereferenced ("default functor calls") so you can pass values by reference with syntactic sugar. At least that's how I remember it--not sure how much has changed. The way you emulate closures in newLISP is morally similar to how cl.el does it for Emacs (true lexical closures are a late addition to Emacs Lisp), namely by generating a completely new function for each closure instance, with the closed-over values in the environment hard-wired into it.

In my opinion, you can find much better versions of this sort of thing in Tcl, if for some reason you really want it.

Props to the author for keeping it going for this long, though.

Re: newLISP v.10.7.4 Development Release

#8
post #4

I find it interesting that they positon newlisp as being "for embedded systems", because from everything I've read it requires a Unix system to run on. Anyone here running newlisp on a microcontroller or similar and able to comment?

A few years ago I compiled it on my old Nokia N900 - not a microcontroller of course, but limited than my desktop computer. I was even able to host simple websites on it using Dragonfly Web Framework for newLISP (I'm one of the authors).

Re: newLISP v.10.7.4 Development Release

#10

I played with this a few years ago. Fogus has an article on Fleunpunkt (spelling?) weird lisps like this and Picolisp that is worth a read. It's a neat little system meant to be used with a Unix command line in my opinion kind of like Picolisp.

Here's a link to the article.

http://blog.fogus.me/2011/05/03/the-german-school-of-lisp-2/

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