David Vázquez

The surprising JSCL rising

2013-05-01T00:00:00-07:00

I am just back from a few days of holidays and have seen how active JSCL is! It is really exciting.

This rising is due to abeaumont probably. I stopped working, but he came up with an idea I liked. It is, why don't integrate JSCL into Conkeror? We would end up with a Lisp programmable browser… that's a practical reason! We did some tests locally and it seemed to work, but now it is time for improving JSCL itself.

It is not the only platform where JSCL could run on. I plan to add support for Node JS. Indeed, it will let us use the REPL and tests in the terminal in addition to the browser, which is a much more convenient way to program.

In the meantime, I would like to improve the compiler a little bit.

Suggestion and patches are very welcome if you want to join us.

https://github.com/davazp/jscl

Special arguments

2013-01-24T00:00:00-08:00

I have learnt a new trick these days. Did you know that you can declare an argument as a special variable? Quoting Hyperspec:

Each required parameter is specified by a parameter variable var. var is bound as a lexical variable unless it is declared special.

It seems to work also for optional and keyword arguments, but Hyperspec does not mention it explicitly. For example, yo can do:

(defvar *variable*)
(defun foo () *variable*)
(defun foobar (&optional *variable*)
  (foo))

Lisp to Javascript compiler

2013-01-04T00:00:00-08:00

Raimon Grau and I have been working on a simple Lisp to Javascript compiler, in order to better understand how to bootstrap it. Now we got it. It compiles itself and the resulting code can be used from the browser. It can even call its own internals, which is quite nice.

It is not very helpful, you can try it. Now I have to think if it could be useful for something… maybe a live Lisp tutorial, or make it suitable for Android. Any suggestions?

The repository with the whole history is at:

http://github.com/davazp/ecmalisp/