Everything Picolisp can do, and more

[mijoharas]

So, one thing I'm not seeing obviously in this list of articles (which seem great in general!) is an explanation of how picolisp contrasts to other lisps? Something explaining why I might reach for picolisp instead of, say, scheme or common lisp?

Can anyone share something showing that, or explaining a little bit more about picolisp for someone unfamiliar with it? (I thought the pros/cons list on the page might describe it a little more, but it didn't make things immediately clear to me).

[lithos]

Yeah LISP has major issues of "that's neat, what happens when you try IO". Anything from drawing on the screen, connecting to a socket, or even nonterminal keyboard input ends up being such a pain.

[tony-allan]

I initially confused this with Lisp for microcontrollers [1]

[1] http://www.ulisp.com/show?3J

[EncomLab]

uLisp is amazing - capable of leveraging a lot of work in a small package.

[agumonkey]

Gotta admit, the author has a nice sense of eDSL https://picolisp.com/wiki/?taskDB

[actionfromafar]

PicoLisp is like an ancient technology or species which somehow survived to this day. It always felt to me like on the cusp to mainstream acceptance.

[BoingBoomTschak]

"No arrays nor floating point numbers" and "mainstream acceptance" don't live in the same world, in my eyes.

Fexprs are cool, though.

[Regenaxer]

No floats, yes, but it has fixnums with infinite precision

[Paul-Craft]

Nitpick: they're actually arbitrary precision. There's no such thing as "infinite" precision on a real machine. This does actually matter on occasion.

[Archit3ch]

I love it, but no floats is a practical limitation.