Owl Lisp -- yet another pet lisp Copyright (c) 2008-2011 Aki Helin
OVERVIEW
Owl Lisp is a simple purely functional Lisp system. It is mainly an implementation of the purely functional subset of R5RS Scheme, has some extra support for purely functional data structures (like a complete order for objects), and an implementation which can be used to run and compile programs fairly portably and efficiently without needing nonstandard support libraries.
REQUIREMENTS
You should have make and gcc installed.
INSTALLATION
Short version:
$ make install
Altervative version:
$ make [...] $ cp bin/ol $HOME/bin/ol $ ol You see a prompt.
(+ 1 2) 3 ^D bye bye _o/~
Ol is the standalone owl read-eval-print loop and compiler. It can be used to rebuild owl, interpret files, evaluate terms interactively or compile programs to fasl images or C files, which can then be compiled with a C-compiler to standalone programs.
FILES
c/ovm.c - the virtual machine / shared owl lisp runtime lib/.scm - some libraries required to build owl bench/.scm - some benchmarks bin/ol - the owl interpreter
USAGE
Owl can be used either interactively, or interpret code from files, or compile programs to fasl-images or c-files. The difference between an owl program and a plain script is that the program should just have a function of one argument as the last value, which will be called with the command line argument list when the program is executed.
In addition to being a regular interpreter, owl also tries to make it easy to compile programs for different platforms. Owl programs can be compiled with ol to C-files, which can be compiled to standalone binaries without needing any owl-specific support files or libraries. The C files also work on 32- and 64-bit systems, and compile as such at least on Linux, OpenBSD, OSX and can be crosscompiled to Windows executables with MinGW.
For example, to build a hello world program: $ echo '(lambda (args) (print "Hello, world!"))' > hello.scm $ ol -o hello.c hello.scm $ gcc -o hello hello.c $ ./hello Hello, world!
Or simply: $ echo '(λ (args) (print "Hello, world!"))' \ | ol -x c | gcc -x c -o hello - && ./hello
Parts of the compiled programs can be translated to C, instead of being simply fasl-encoded, to increase speed. Using the --native flag compiles most of the bytecode to C, and --usual-suspects compiles typically used functions. To make programs run faster, one can use for example:
$ ol --native -o test.c test.scm && gcc -O2 -o test test.c
DOCUMENTATION
For further documentation, see:
http://code.google.com/p/owl-lisp/wiki/OwlManual
The source code repository is at: