Back from Vacation and Names

Most of last week I was on vacation. The rest of the week, I've spent a little time digging into ToyScript and filling out the framework I'll need for implementing lisp on the DLR. More about that later. I've temporarily decided to call this project SiliconLisp. This roughly follows the convention of naming dynamic languages for the CLR as Iron-. I've just changed the element it's made out of. Actually, I was originally going to call it CarbonLisp, but I didn't want to confuse this with the Mac windowing library Carbon. I may go with CarbonLisp anyway. If you have a suggestion for the name, please leave me a comment.

Looking into ToyScript

I'm checking out John Lam's ToyScript. It's an implementation of a small scripting language, and it was written as an introduction to working on the DLR.

Lisp and .NET

The Truth about Lisp Why does that link matter? Because I've been thinking about implementing Common Lisp on the CLR and the DLR. When interpreted, it would primarily work with the DLR, but as declare statements are added and the Lisp code becomes more static, it would be able to leverage the CLR directly. At one point, I was thinking about implementing Scheme, but I've moved away from that. When I started learning Common Lisp, I thought that I preferred Scheme. But now I've done a project in Scheme (a simple todo-list manager, similar to todo.txt, and I've decided that I prefer Common Lisp after all. Scheme's still great. I have a nice clean feeling whenever I code in it, but I think I prefer CL's more complete language specification. It's still not really complete enough. (Hello? threads, networking, Hello?) Also, I'm beginning to grok continuations, but I don't have a clue how I'd implement them in .NET. So I'm just not doing that right now. Still, what craziness is this? Well, I've been doing a lot of .NET at work, and I'd like to be able to use a more powerful, sane (for some definition of sane) language. I'd also like to be able to produce assemblies that can be called from C# or whatever. Basically, I want a lisp that is a first-class citizen of the CLR. And I've been wanting to do more Lisp for my personal projects. I'll let you know how it goes. Or I'll put my head between my knees and breath deeply until this latest light-headedness passes.

Update

I've had a post about Erlang and thinking concurrently in the works for a month, while life and work have gotten in the way. That article's still in the works, but I'd also like to resurrect this and post about some other things.