PICOLISP(1) User Commands PICOLISP(1)
NAME
pil, picolisp - a fast, lightweight Lisp interpreter
SYNOPSIS
pil [arguments ...] [-] [arguments ...] [+]
picolisp [arguments ...] [-] [arguments ...] [+]
DESCRIPTION
PicoLisp is a Lisp interpreter with a small memory footprint, yet relatively high execution speed. It combines an elegant and powerful lan-
guage with built-in database functionality.
pil is the startup front-end for the interpreter. It takes care of starting the binary base system and loading a useful runtime environ-
ment.
picolisp is just the bare interpreter binary. It is usually called in stand-alone scripts, using the she-bang notation in the first line,
passing the minimal environment in lib.l and loading additional files as needed:
#!/usr/bin/picolisp /usr/lib/picolisp/lib.l
(load "@ext.l" "myfiles/lib.l" "myfiles/foo.l")
(do ... something ...)
(bye)
INVOCATION
PicoLisp has no pre-defined command line flags; applications are free to define their own. Any built-in or user-level Lisp function can be
invoked from the command line by prefixing it with a hyphen. Examples for built-in functions useful in this context are version (print the
version number) or bye (exit the interpreter). Therefore, a minimal call to print the version number and then immediately exit the inter-
preter would be:
$ pil -version -bye
Any other argument (not starting with a hyphen) should be the name of a file to be loaded. If the first character of a path or file name is
an at-mark, it will be substituted with the path to the installation directory.
All arguments are evaluated from left to right, then an interactive read-eval-print loop is entered (with a colon as prompt).
A single hyphen stops the evaluation of the rest of the command line, so that the remaining arguments may be processed under program con-
trol.
If the very last command line argument is a single plus character, debugging mode is switched on at interpreter startup, before evaluating
any of the command line arguments. A minimal interactive session is started with:
$ pil +
Here you can access the reference manual
: (doc)
and the online documentation for most functions,
: (doc 'vi)
or directly inspect their sources:
: (vi 'doc)
The interpreter can be terminated with
: (bye)
or by typing Ctrl-D.
FILES
Runtime files are maintained in the ~/.pil directory:
~/.pil/tmp/<pid>/
Process-local temporary directories
~/.pil/history
The line editor's history file
BUGS
PicoLisp doesn't try to protect you from every possible programming error ("You asked for it, you got it").
AUTHOR
Alexander Burger <abu@software-lab.de>
RESOURCES
Home page: http://home.picolisp.com
Download: http://www.software-lab.de/down.html
PICOLISP(1)
