shithub: femtolisp

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 Another design goal is to avoid spurious novelties. Many others offering their own "shiny new" lisp dialects get carried away and change anything that strikes their fancy. These changes have no effect except incompatibility, and often make the language worse because the new design was not as carefully thought out and has not stood the test of time. For example, how does it help to remove backquote? One design changes the syntax of `quote`. Some systems disallow dotted lists. (I've seen all three of these.) What's the point? Implementers wave the banner of "simplicity", yet wedge in all kinds of weird implicit behaviors and extra evaluation rules.

-Lately a surprising amount of FUD has been spread about tail call optimization. I agree that not every language needs it, but I would like to refute the idea that it makes interpreters slow. Look at the "tiny" subdirectory or the "interpreter" branch to see a pure s-expr interpreter with efficient TCO. All you have to do is keep track of whether you're in tail position, which can be done very cheaply. These interpreters are difficult to beat for speed, yet they have lexical scope and TCO.

+Lately a surprising amount of FUD has been spread about proper tail recursion. I agree that not every language needs it, but I would like to refute the idea that it makes interpreters slow. Look at the "tiny" subdirectory or the "interpreter" branch to see a pure s-expr interpreter with efficient proper tail calls. All you have to do is keep track of whether you're in tail position, which can be done very cheaply. These interpreters are difficult to beat for speed, yet they have lexical scope and proper tail calls.

 This project is mostly a matter of style. Look at the code and you'll understand.