[toronto-lisp] Meetup Success!

[Abram Hindle]

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Rudolf wrote:
> 
> Lush is the lisp that interfaces with C easily right? I was interested
> in looking at it when I had the crazy idea (well it was my friend's
> idea) of writing another Lisp dialect. What's Lush like compared to
> Scheme or CL? What does it make easier to do?
> 

http://lush.sf.net/

Lush includes an interpreter and a compiler which generates C code. It
is very easy to inline C in lush. It has builtin support for Matrices
and binds to the GNU Scientific Library (eigenvectors, regression
models, etc) and some machine learning libraries. It also is bound to
SDL so it is very easy to program simple SDL games in LUSH and they
provide a lunar lander example which is somewhat playable but quite
small. It is pretty neat to SDL from within the interpretter.

Lush is very limited, it doesn't do tail recursion optimization (and I
haven't checked if GCC picks up on the tail recursion in the code that
LUSH generates but I doubt it). So it is a very imperative kind of Lisp.
It supposedly doesn't even do much in the way of garbage collection, so
it is pretty brain dead. That said, being able to do numerics quickly
and not in C is a nice benefit or being any to inline C for tight loops
is nice too.

I am considering using it for some GUI work I have to do.

A better review can be found at:

http://lists.sfgoth.com/pipermail/rotwang-l/2004-February/000086.html

Also lush is installable via apt in ubuntu.

abram
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