The MakerLisp Machine is a portable, modular, computer system, designed to recapture the feel of classic computing, with modern hardware.
The machine centers on a 2” x 3.5” CPU "business card", based on a 50 MHz Zilog eZ80, which can be used stand-alone, or plugged in to a 2” x 8” main board, for expansion to a full computer system. A laser-cut wood enclosure holds a small keyboard, an LCD monitor, the circuit boards, and a prototyping area with a breadboard for electronics experimentation and development.
The system software is 'MakerLisp', an open source implementation of a 'bare metal' Lisp, for Maker/DIY projects. MakerLisp has the Scheme evaluation model, Common Lisp-style low-level macros and primitive functions, and C language arithmetic and standard library functions. The system is written in portable C, and just-in-time compiles a tiny core Lisp language to SECD VM instructions. All higher-level forms are provided via Lisp functions and macros.
In this talk, we'll discuss and demonstrate MakerLisp on the machine, reviewing the language feature and implementation choices that were made in order to support an expressive and extensible dialect of Lisp, with good performance, in a small system.
More information is available at:
and on Facebook at:
https://www.facebook.com/makerlisp
The slides for this talk are available under Documentation on that page. A source preview is available at:
https://makerlisp.com/source-preview
To build a MakerLisp demonstration on Linux, cd to preview folder and:
gcc -olisp -O3 -Wall -I. lisp.c platform.c -lmTo start lisp
Start: ./lispThere are demonstration programs/functions in ./preview, for example, 'cat.l', 'hello.l', 'fact.l', and 'sieve.l'. At the MakerLisp (">") prompt, start a program by using the name of the file, minus the extension, as the function name, for example "(hello)", "(fact 4)", "(sieve 30)", or "(cat 'cat.l)".
'lisp.c.txt" is posted here as a reading reference, it is identical to lisp.c in ./preview.
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.