newLISP Fan Club

@Yael, you mentioned "Hyperlisp"...

Quote from: Yael on July 26, 2026, 11:03:23 PMHyperlisp-Sintaxial is the one to go. Hyperlisp is Newlisp on Dlang, with all Newlisp functions and libraries (modules) hardcoded in native D

Do you have a link for that? I've tried looking under various things but haven't been able to find it. Thanks!

Hi! I'm glad this forum is being revived, and I hope that NewLisp finds alternate hosting and maintainers.

With respect to Janet -- for what it's worth, I did successfully make the jump from NewLisp. So, if you'll indulge, a few notes about why and what I found.

I got re-interested in Lisp about the time Paul Graham started writing about his Viaweb experience (e-commerce server, written in Common Lisp). I couldn't make Common Lisp click for me though... Too many exceptions, nutcase documentation (CLHS, need I say more?), every kind of data structure was handled a different way, etc. After a long walk through the desert, I stumbled on NewLisp. It was a long drink of cool water! Many times, things worked exactly the way I expected them to. Often I could just guess at what the appropriate function would be and it was. Combine that with excellent documentation and quick interpreter and I was off to the races. I did a number of things with it, both for work and for fun (current link to my weight+balance calculator: https://hg.sr.ht/~oofoe/wb, and an implementation of Jef Raskin's FLOW language: https://hg.sr.ht/~oofoe/flow)

However, I started finding the need to distribute compiled executables and with the Oracle legal stuff, I wasn't too keen on continuing to use Java for the GUI parts. I dabbled for a bit in Dr. Racket, it at least seemed simpler than Common Lisp, and had the GUI/graphics built in. I tried other things, including ill-advised flirtations with Python compilers. And then... One day I stumbled across Janet.

The initial experience was positive; it had some of the most important features of NewLisp like implicit data access. It does do some strange things, like "#" for comments, but once you see what they're doing with the semicolon for the splice operator, you forgive it. However, for me, the three absolute killer features of Janet are PEGs, multitasking and compiling.

Parsing Expression Grammars (PEG) are something I got used to in REBOL and will never voluntarily give up. They turn parsing from mysterious incantations at midnight (yacc or PCRE) into clear, documented rules that can stand the light of day. I even wrote an PEG that transpiles Janet formatted source code into JavaScript. Absolutely indispensable for correct, reliable parsing. Janet's implementation is clean and flexible.

With multiple network connections, GUIs and long running processes, multitasking of some sort is a must. Janet provides several flavours. The simplest is a "fiber", which is a kind of in-process green thread. Then, threads (of course), and finally actual multiple process synchronization. So far, I've only needed fibers, but it's been more than enough to handle multiple data streams for simulating and controlling scientific instruments.

And compiling. If you're on Linux (or Mac, I think), it works like falling off a log. If you're on Windows it's annoying (thanks Micro$oft), but still doable. It uses a two stage compilation that allows you to control what gets compiled in your source (like C macros, but much nicer). Compared to Racket (or even other scripting language compilers, e.g. Nuitka?), it produces a tiny result (1.7MB for a commercial product where I compiled in all the resources and even the user manual to a single executable).

There are other things that I've discovered, but those are the big three for me. I think if any of that whets your appetite, you should definitely give Janet a look-see.

However! I would never have gotten to Janet without NewLisp. Its simplicity, complete documentation and friendliness to an uninitiated seeker are what brought me into the Lisp fold to stay. I hope it will always remain available for others to discover.

P.S. A really nice book-length tutorial for Janet: https://janet.guide/

OK, see that you're using gs:set-titled-border -- I haven't used that one myself.



Does seem that gs:-set-font won't work for that through the GUIServer.



However, the SWT (successor to AWT which is used by GUIServer, I think) will allow to set a font with the .setFont() method. Perhaps AWT has the same capability and it's just not wired up in the GUIServer. So, if you're comfortable with Java you could get the GUIServer code, find the set-titled-border handler and see if you can change it there, then recompile. See here for possible example: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7117408/change-group-widget-title-color-in-swt#7118384">//http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7117408/change-group-widget-title-color-in-swt#7118384



Otherwise, make your window a canvas instead and place the widgets and draw the border yourself and label it with the font you prefer.



Another possibility: That looks like a system default font. If you're running in Linux maybe you don't have the "icon" font used for labelling those things installed? I can't remember what the font is, but that would be worth investigating, especially if you see other applications on your system with the same problem.



Good luck!

Can you post source for this GUI display? Not even sure how you're displaying it since NewLisp GUIServer doesn't seem to support the AWT Group widget.



If you're just dropping text over a hand drawn group, you can do it using the gs:set-font function.

Hi!



Thanks very much for fixing that. It's a small thing, but it can really trip someone up when they're trying to make something like that work for the first time.



Any possibility of getting the "(import LIBRARY)" syntax in Windows too? With maybe some way to list the symbols in the library?



Thanks!

Incidentally, here's how to determine if a file is a png image using the standard libpng library:

Code Select Expand

;; C library functions.
(import "msvcrt.dll" "fopen")
(import "msvcrt.dll" "fread")

;; PNG library functions.
(import "libpng16-16.dll" "png_sig_cmp")

(define (pngfile? path)
  "( path -- f) Determines if path is a %.png file."

  (letn ((header "XXXXXXXX")
(fp (fopen path "rb")))
(fread header 1 (length header) fp)
(zero? (png_sig_cmp header 0 (length header)))))


Sorry, Windows only at this point. UNIX users please substitute library names as appropriate.

Hi!



In my quest to construct a program to derive the question to the answer of Life, the Universe and Everything (which is, as any schoolchild knows, 42), I wrote a very simple genetic algorithm solver.



I don't mean simple as in "simple to use", I mean absolute braindead simple. By some definitions, this is not really a genetic algorithm because the "genome" is the same as the data being operated on (there is no "expression"), but it's a cute toy and somebody else might find it entertaining as well:



https://bitbucket.org/oofoe/ga/src/9523e44cb284aa8e9f030610d0e84e2d922ff10c/adder/?at=default">https://bitbucket.org/oofoe/ga/src/9523 ... at=default">https://bitbucket.org/oofoe/ga/src/9523e44cb284aa8e9f030610d0e84e2d922ff10c/adder/?at=default



I am currently hard at work on a new program which will use a genetic algorithm to do lossy image compression through vector shapes, just have to teach NewLisp about reading %.png files...

Hi!



Hope this is the best place to post this...



The first example for import at http://www.newlisp.org/downloads/newlisp_manual.html#import">http://www.newlisp.org/downloads/newlis ... tml#import">http://www.newlisp.org/downloads/newlisp_manual.html#import is incorrect. It should have the following marked line added:

Code Select Expand


(define LIBC (lookup ostype '(
("Windows" "msvcrt.dll")
("OSX" "libc.dylib")

(import LIBC "printf") ;; This line needs to be added to make example work.

(printf "%g %s %d %cn" 1.23 "hello" 999 65)
Thanks!

Hi!



I have something like this:

Code Select Expand

(gs:panel 'Panel)
(gs:check-box 'Visible 'checkboxing "visible)
(gs:add-to 'Panel 'Visible)

And it's very nice. I get events when the user changes the value to my checkboxing function and so forth.



However, what if I want to set the value from the program?



(gs:set-value 'Visible true) does not work... Any suggestions?



Thanks!

Hi!



Is there anything like the Python webbrowser library to launch a file in the system specific web browser?



I'm currently using

Code Select Expand

(! (string "explorer.exe " pfile) 0)
where pfile is something like "c:\temp\card-preview.html", but this is very specifically Windows...



Thanks!

Thanks for taking a look!



Macros are supposed to be useful for "writing the code that you would have written if you had the patience". Since guiserver uses symbols, I figured that they would be perfect for button assembly boilerplate. However, I had to cheat with sending strings to guiserver because the symbols weren't getting quoted in the correct namespace. So here I admit there's no real advantage to the macro.



It seems there's also the (macro) function, which may do more what I want. So I'll probably try it later.

OK, think I've got it. Here's the revised macro:

Code Select Expand

(define-macro (button3 _parent _name _buttons)
  (letn ((panel (sym (string (eval _parent) "-" (eval _name))))
   (slots '("west" "center" "east"))
   (bname nil)
   (i nil))
  (gs:panel panel)
  (gs:set-border-layout panel)
  (dotimes (i (length (eval _buttons)))
    (setq bname (sym (string panel "-" ((eval _buttons) i 0))))
    (gs:button bname
     (if (= 3 (length ((eval _buttons) i)))
 ((eval _buttons) i 2)
 'gs:no-action)
     ((eval _buttons) i 1))
    (gs:add-to panel bname (slots i))
    ))
  )

The key is that the guiserver will accept strings instead of symbols, but you have to indicate the namespace (context):

Code Select Expand

 (button3 'DC 'West
      '((New   "new..."   "MAIN:card-new")
       (Clone "clone...")
       (Back  "<--"      "MAIN:card-back")))

This will set 'card-new and 'card-back as event handlers, but the clone button will use the default gs:no-action.



It would be nice to know how to do this with proper symbols in the macro, but this is working for now and the macro simplifies my GUI setup code quite a lot.



If anyone has any improvements to suggest, I'm all ears!

Hi!



I am experimenting with macros to do more "declarative" setups in guiserver. Here is a macro that I have created to make a three button setup:

Code Select Expand


(define-macro (button3 _parent _name _buttons)
  (letn ((panel (sym (string (eval _parent) "-" (eval _name))))
   (slots '("west" "center" "east"))
   (bname nil)
   (i nil))
  (gs:panel panel)
  (gs:set-border-layout panel)
  (dotimes (i (length (eval _buttons)))
    (setq bname (sym (string panel "-" ((eval _buttons) i 0))))
  (println "Setting up " bname)
    (gs:button bname 'gs:no-action ((eval _buttons) i 1))
    (gs:add-to panel bname (slots i))
    )))

I call it like this:

Code Select Expand


 (button3 'DC 'East  '((Next "-->") (View "<o>") (Kill "X")))

This creates a panel (DC-East) that has three buttons (DC-East-Next, DC-East-View and DC-East-Kill). They're all set up and ready to go.



However, I can't figure out how to pass in an optional event handler for each button and have the macro assemble it correctly for the gs:button call. I want to do something like this

Code Select Expand


 ;; The "View" button doesn't have a handler yet, should default to gs:no-action.
  (button3 'DC 'East  '((Next "-->" 'next-card) (View "<o>") (Kill "X" 'kill-card)))

I am just getting invalid function or macro expansion problems when I try to do this. Any suggestions?



Thanks!

This looks quite interesting! I'll give it a try when I update to the new release.



Thanks for releasing it!

Hi!



I ran into a little problem when using %xmlrpc-client.lsp with our python/django XMLRPC server at work. It has a very strict interpretation of how many arguments it will accept for certain functions, like system.listMethods, so the default request with the single dummy argument won't work.



I wound up adding something like this to xmlrpc-client.lsp:

Code Select Expand


(define (format-request method)
  "( method /arg.../ -- XML) Compose XML request."

  (let ((xml (format
     "<?xml version="1.0"?><methodCall><methodName>%s</methodName><params>"
     method)))
    (dolist (value (args))
      (push (format "<param><value>%s</value></param>" value) xml -1))
    (push "</params></methodCall>n" xml -1)))

Then changing system.listMethods to:

Code Select Expand


(define (system.listMethods url)
    (execute url (format-request "system.listMethods")))

Technically, format-request should also determine the type of the argument values (and encode lists and dictionaries correctly), but if you're only using string arguments, it should suffice.



Maybe someone has a better format-request they could share? ; - )