E-on-CL

From Erights

This is an implementation of E programming language in Common Lisp.

There are as yet no releases, but the source is available in a Git repository:

https://github.com/kpreid/e-on-cl

Status, Description

The full E language is implemented, by compilation to Common Lisp and execution by the underlying CL implementation. The libraries are incomplete.

E-on-CL requires E-on-Java for:

• Support for the E parser (which is written in ANTLR.
• Parts of the library implementation (those emakers which are not different)

There is Updoc and a REPL, written in CL.

IO is limited to:

• Writing text to stdout and stderr.
• Reading and writing files as text from absolute pathnames.
• TCP sockets, as octets or a small selection of character encodings.
• Unsafely accessing the underlying Lisp system.

Differences from E-on-Java

Support for EIO and DeepFrozen auditing.

throw() and CatchExpr have been changed to reduce information leakage: see sealed throw.

makeEProxyResolver is replaced with makeProxy, a safer interface.

Updoc does not ignore the return value of expressions when the updoc script omits them.

News

For major announcements, watch the e-lang mailing list. For individual changes to the repository, E-on-CL is monitored on cia.navi.cx which offers status pages, RSS feeds, and IRC messages.

Requirements

• A Common Lisp implementation.

  E-on-CL is designed to be portable, but requires many nonstandard features for full operation. I use SBCL, and therefore its support is the most complete. Other implementations E-on-CL includes some support for, roughly in order of completeness, are Clozure CL, CMUCL, ABCL, CLISP, LispWorks, and Allegro CL.

  Whether E-on-CL works on any given implementation (other than SBCL) will vary as I make changes. If it doesn’t run on an implementation you’d like to use, please let me know and I’ll see what can be done about it.

• The asdf-installable libraries bordeaux-threads, cl-ppcre, cl-yacc, cl-fad, genhash, rt, and trivial-garbage.
• An existing E-on-Java installation.
• One of either:
  • the E-on-Java source distribution, placed at $EHOME/src (XXX This is an inappropriate location), or
  • the asdf-installable libraries ZIP and Salza, which will be used to extract .emaker files from $EHOME/e.jar.
• bash and perl, if you wish to use the standard startup script clrune (equivalent to rune in E-on-Java.

Previous discussion / timeline

Posts from me on the e-lang list containing information about E-on-CL:

1. 2004-12-11: Initial announcement
2. Early technical notes on the compilation method
3. Message dispatch and 'native' object definition
4. 2004-12-20: Status update
5. 2005-04-16: Repository available
6. Portability, naming, and usage info
7. More of the same
8. 2005-05-14: Reply to MarkM's comments on the source
9. 2005-06-25: Status update
10. XXX Fill in more recent info here.