A LISP written in Rust.

The idea is to write a core in Rust that is just enough to bootstrap the rest in PICL itself.

• Simple, consistent API for data manipulation a la Clojure.

• Simple pattern matching (more like destructuring)

• Regex literals /.*(a|b)/ a la AWK?

  • Following the EDN syntax this should be #r".*(a|b)" to signify the start start of a regex as a reader level tag.
  • Alternatively, I have always really liked Julia's string macros work which seems similar to CL's reader macros and Hy's tag macros:

  (deftag my_tag (expr) `(~expr ~expr))
  

  • In Julia they are defined simply as any macro that is named as a single character followed by _str. They then get applied when that character is prepended to a string literal

  --> r"a regex literal", f"x = 3y + 2"

  • The reader/tag macros on the other hand match the EDN idea and are defined as (defreader ...) or (deftag ...) and then called like so:

  --> #my-tag FORM

  • They allow for longer tag names but not the nice string application.
  • ...TBH, why not both?!
  • https://docs.julialang.org/en/stable/manual/metaprogramming/
  • http://docs.hylang.org/en/stable/language/api.html#deftag
  • https://gist.github.com/chaitanyagupta/9324402