Grey, dear
Friend, is all theory(Goethe)
Grey, dear
Friend, is all theory
(Goethe)
If you would like to get some hands-on experience with Pico Lisp, you can download the latest version here. It should compile and run on current 32-bit GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X (Darwin) and Cygwin/Win32 distributions.
Pico Lisp is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it under the conditions of the GNU General Public License (GPL).
Please take a look at the README file, the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ), the Pico Lisp Tutorial, the guide to Pico Lisp Application Development, or the Pico Lisp Reference, and download
Then follow the instructions in the INSTALL file.
Note that there is also an ongoing development ("testing") version of the next release available (still subject to change), and an archive of previous releases (see below).
Since picoLisp-2.3.0, the Java Applet GUI is no longer part of the standard release. If you still want to use it, please download picoJavaGUI.tgz and unpack it in the installation directory.
For something even smaller, download miniPicoLisp.tgz. It is a minimal version, without support for databases, UTF-8, bignums, IPC, networking and other system-dependent functions. A kind of "pure" Pico Lisp (not "pure Lisp"!). It supports the full Pico Lisp language, but runs faster, and uses even less memory space. It should also not be restricted to Unix. In addition, it compiles and runs also on 64-bit systems.
Doug Snead wrote about his experiences in porting Pico Lisp to Cygwin.
An introduction to writing browser-based applications in Pico Lisp, using the XHTML/CSS GUI-Framework, can be found in the "Pico Lisp Application Development" tutorial. In the last section, it describes a minimal but quite complete Application. ERP in 700 lines! :-)
Some philosophical and practical aspects are discussed in "A Radical Approach to Application Development (PDF)", and a description of Pico Lisp DB and GUI Development principles is in "A Unifying Language for Database And User Interface Development".
If you'd like to try the online-version of the toy RC Flight Simulator (the plain Xlib version of it is also included in the distribution), point your Java-enabled browser (directly, without a proxy) to rcsim.software-lab.biz.
Any feedback is welcome! Many concepts in the Pico Lisp system are not well documented yet, and might not be obvious to a traditional Lisp programmer. So please don't hesitate to ask, and discuss with me (abu@software-lab.de). Or join our discussion at the IRC #picolisp channel on FreeNode.net!
Hope you enjoy :-)