PICOLISP(1)

💅 PICOLISP — the User Commands page, bestie edition 🦋

okay so sit down, grab a strawberry, because we're talking about PICOLISP(1) from the User Commands section of the manual and it's genuinely iconic.

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✨ NAME ✨

pil, picolisp — a fast, lightweight Lisp interpreter. that's it, that's the whole intro, and honestly? it ate. 🔥

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

pil [arguments ...] [-] [arguments ...] [+]
picolisp [arguments ...] [-] [arguments ...] [+]

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💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

PicoLisp is a Lisp interpreter with a small memory footprint, yet relatively high execution speed. no cap. it's the whole package: an elegant and powerful language plus built-in database functionality, like, who else is doing it like her. 👑

pil is the startup front-end</> for the interpreter. she's the responsible older sister — she takes care of starting the binary base system and loading a useful runtime environment.

picolisp is just the bare interpreter binary. no frills, no runtime, just vibes and raw power. it's 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)

that's the whole script, bestie. she-bang and go. ✨

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🎀 INVOCATION 🎀

PicoLisp has no pre-defined command line flags — applications are free to define their own. (yes really, you get to be the main character and pick your own flags. freedom. 💅)

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 interpreter 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. cute shortcut, we love her. 🫶

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 control. lowkey a whole power move.

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 (expects the shell variable BROWSER to be set, defaults to "w3m")

: (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. bye bestie, it was real. 😭💜

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🦋 FILES 🦋

Runtime files are maintained in the ~/.pil directory:

• ~/.pil/tmp/<pid>/ — Process-local temporary directories. every process gets her own little room. boundaries! ✨
• ~/.pil/rc — Loaded after interpreter startup.
• ~/.pil/viprc — Loaded by the Vip editor.

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💀 BUGS 💀

PicoLisp doesn't try to protect you from every possible programming error ("You asked for it, you got it"). fr fr, she said what she said and she's not sorry. 🙈

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

Alexander Burger <abu@software-lab.de>

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🌈 RESOURCES 🌈

• Home page: http://home.picolisp.com
• Download: http://www.software-lab.de/down.html

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and that's the whole PICOLISP(1) page, bestie — straight from the User Commands manual, no cap, every flag and file accounted for. go forth and (bye) on your own terms. 🎀💖✨