newLISP tutorial/introduction

[cormullion]

I've updated the "Introduction to newLISP" document to celebrate (and accompany) the official release of newLISP 9.0. Lutz has kindly made it available on the Documentation page of the official newLISP site. Unfortunately, I didn't manage to include the new *ref-all* function, which Lutz squeezed in at the last minute...! But I've made changes and additions to keep it generally up to date and hopefully useful.



You can get it here:



http://newlisp.org/introduction-to-newlisp.pdf">//http://newlisp.org/introduction-to-newlisp.pdf



Some background for newcomers: After enjoying some Ruby and Python tutorials last year, I discovered newLISP, and I would have quite liked to read a similar document describing the basics of the language in an informal way. I ended up writing the tutorial I had wanted to read myself! It's not quite "newLISP for Dummies", but aims at perhaps a similar level of experience - people familiar with the basic concepts of 'scripting' but who are not experienced programmers, and certainly not Common Lisp or Scheme users, for whom unlearning is sometimes as important as learning.



In fact, I now suspect that quite a lot of people who come to newLISP are fairly experienced - at least the forum gives that impression - and they would perhaps welcome a more extensive (intensive?) high-level text than this Introduction provides. But then of course, the newLISP documentation (the manual and the Design Patterns document, for example) can already meet most of their needs, and they can get the specific information from the other sources, such as wikis and forum discussions, rather than the more conventional "book" style of presentation I used...



Anyway, I always welcome comments and suggestions for improvement, so feel free to send them on!

[frontera000]

Oh my Deus!



You wrote all this?



Anyway, it is amazing.  Very clear and readable.  And helpful! Thank you.

[newdep]

good job !..Pfiew.. Slick ! ;-)

[cormullion]

thanks! You read it here first. When you see it in the shops, you'll say - "Oh, I've read that!" :-)

[robert.brandner]

you really did a great job here. the manual by lutz is of course really good, but it's a bit hard for a beginner (like me).

what I'm missing in your tutorial is a chapter about how to define functions. they are defined here and there in the examples, but a chapter like for define-macro I could not find. would be nice if you could complete your tutorial for that.



regards, robert

[cormullion]

Thanks Robert, your comments are much appreciated.



It's funny, your point had already occurred to me, and more than once. I started trying to think where to put it, but could never find the perfect place. Then I started using (define while doing something else, and kind of introducing it by the back door. It's like you learn some things directly, and absorb other things indirectly...



But perhaps it's time I put a proper section in... :-)