Language Guide¶

Hello World¶

As any good programming language documentation should, let’s start with hello world:

(define main
  (lambda (args)
    (print "hello world")))

Here we see many of the normal expectations from a hello world: a function declaration and a print statement. define binds a name to any value you’d like. In this case, we’re binding the symbol main to be a function.

Functions are declared using the lambda statement. They are enclosed in parentheses, and first contain a list of arguments, then an expression that is their implementation. Our main function simply prints a string. We can run this script using the bin/runfile utility bundled with funlisp:

$ make bin/runfile
# some make output
$ bin/runfile scripts/hello_world.lisp
hello world

Comments¶

Line comments are created in funlisp by starting them with a semicolon (;). Everything after that, until the end of the line, is ignored by the parser. Here are some examples:

; i'm a comment
(print "i'm some code" ; with a comment in the middle
)

Types¶

To accelerate our learning, try compiling the REPL. You might need to install libedit to build it.

$ make bin/repl
# some make output
$ bin/repl
>

Like most REPLs, this takes a line at a time, executes it, and prints the result. We’ll use this for demonstrating some of funlisp’s types.

> 5
5
> "blah"
blah

The two most obvious data types are the integer and string, as you can see above.

> 'hello
hello
> '(1 2 3)
(1 2 3 )

Above are two less obvious types, the “symbol” and the “list”. Symbols are like strings, but they are used to bind names to values in lisp. Lists are the fundamental data structure of funlisp, used to hold both data and code! Both of those had quotes in front of them. Quoting in this way prevents funlisp from evaluating them, since symbols and lists behave a bit differently when they’re evaluated:

> hello
error: symbol not found in scope

The symbol was looked up in the scope, but it turns out that there’s no hello in scope. However, we know several things that are in the scope, from our hello world program:

> define
<builtin function define>
> lambda
<builtin function lambda>
> print
<builtin function print>

Neat! The symbols are names for builtin functions.

Lists behave in a special way when evaluated too. Funlisp tries to “call” the first item on the list, with the other items as arguments. We saw this with hello world as well:

> (1 2)
error: not callable!
> (print 2)
2

Turns out that “1” is not callable, but the function attached to the print symbol is!

Integer Functions¶

So, we’ve seen some neat tricks with the four basic builtin types. Now let’s see how to manipulate integers:

> (+ 1 1)
2
> (- 5 1)
4
> (/ 4 3)
1
> (* 2 2)
4

Those basic arithmetic functions behave like any other function call. They look a bit odd because we expect arithmetic operators to be in the middle of an expression, but you’ll get used to it!

> (= 5 5)
1
> (> 5 6)
0
> (<= 4 5)
1

Comparison operators look like that too. They return integers, which are used for conditionals in funlisp the same way that C does.

Control Flow¶

Speaking of control-flow, funlisp has a handy if statement:

> (if (= 5 4) (print "impossible") (print "boring"))
boring

Since we try to make everything in funlisp into an expression, if statements must have both a “value if true” and a “value if false”. You cannot leave out the else.

Funlisp doesn’t currently have any form of iteration. However, it supports recursion, which is a very powerful way of iterating, and handling objects like lists.

Functions and Recursion¶

We’ve already seen the lambda syntax of creating functions for our hello world. Now let’s check out some others:

> (define double (lambda (x) (* 2 x)))
<lambda function>
> (double 2)
4

We can recursively call our own function, for great good:

(define factorial
  (lambda (x)
    (if (= 0 x)
      1
      (* x (factorial (- x 1))))))

We can also use that capability to process a list of elements:

(define increment-all
  (lambda (x)
    (if (null? x)
      '()
      (cons (+ 1 x) (increment-all (cdr x))))))

Oops, looks like I’ve introduced you to cons and cdr. These are from a family of list processing functions that do the following:

(cons x l) - put x at the beginning of list l
(car l) - return the first item in l
(cdr l) - return the elements after the first one in l

Higher Order Functions¶

Now that we’ve incremented each item in a list, what if we want to decrement? We’d have to rewrite the whole function again, replacing the plus with a minus. Thankfully, we can do a better job, using map:

(define increment-all (lambda (l) (map (lambda (x) (+ 1 x) l))))

Map is a function which takes another function, as well as a list of items, and applies it to each item, returning the list of results.

We also have access to the reduce function, which applies that function to the list in pairs:

> (reduce + '(1 2 3))
6

The End¶

This is the end of our short guide to funlisp. Hopefully as time goes by, the language will grow, and maybe even obtain a standard library! But for now, funlisp remains sleek and small.