Lambda the Ultimate

I had been breathlessly watching Paul Graham's website hoping for news about Arc, his "New Lisp". But I hadn't realized that a group of developers had already beaten him to the punch!

newLisp is an updated (and scaled down) Lisp, targeted at the scripting world. From the web site:

newLISP is a general purpose scripting language for developing Web applications and programs in general and in the domain of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and statistics.

Among its many interesting features (such as useful functions for getting scripting work done, good performance, and small footprint) are:

• Dynamic and lexical scoping with multiple name spaces
• OOP extensions
• TCP/IP and UDP networking functions
• Perl compatible regular expressions, PCRE
• Matrix and advanced math functions
• Financial math functions
• Statistical functions
• XML functions and SXML support
• Tcl/Tk Graphical Fontend
• Modules for MYSQL, SQLite and ODBC Database access
• CGI, SMTP, POP3 and FTP Modules
• Complete documentation in HTML and PDF

While many new scripting languages languish with good implementations, but no fully-realized libraries or interaction with outside software, newLisp seems to have sprung fully-formed, with various useful libraries already implemented.

Newlisp compiles on most LINUX, UNIX versions, CYGWIN, Windows, and presumably Mac OS X. It is licensed under the GNU Public License, GPL

Who knows -- perhaps now Ehud will have a Lisp with which he can finally get some scripting work done!

Here's a spectacular paper by Oleg Kiselyov and Chung-chieh Shan which describes a method of faking dependent types in Haskell using type classes.

McBride mentions that, with all the tricks, the programmer still must decide if data belong in compile-time or run-time terms. "The barrier represented by :: has not been broken, nor is it likely to be in the near future." If our reflect and especially reify functions have not broken the barrier, they at least dug a tunnel underneath.

(Mentioned yesterday by Dave Menendez in the Apple Flunks... thread, but I thought the paper merited a discussion of its own)