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README

Mineral.js is a yet another Lisp in the browser started as an exercise after reading "The Roots of Lisp" paper by Paul Graham. Mineral's syntax is heavily inspired by Clojure.

Primitives

Generic primitives:

  • quote
  • atom
  • eq
  • head
  • tail
  • cons
  • if
  • fn
  • def
  • apply

Mineral specific primitives:

  • externalcall (to apply JS functions)
  • infixcall (to invoke JS infix operations)
  • hashmap (creates a new hash map)
  • assoc (adds a key-value pair to the map)
  • dissoc (removes a key-value pair from the map)
  • get (gets the element for the provided key)
  • trycatch (wraps the JS' try-catch)
  • while (since JavaScript lacks tail-call optimization)

Syntactic Sugar

  • lambda function: (% arg1 arg2 ... argN . s-expression)
  • commenting out a s-exp by prepending with #_: #_ (map f list)
  • list ['a 'b 'c] is the same as ('a 'b 'c)
  • comma is white space, i.e., this '[1, 2, 3] is equivalent to this '(1 2 3)
  • maps are representad as {'k1 "v1" 'k2 "v2"} or {"a" "b", "c" "d", "e" "f"}
  • unquote with ~, unquote splicing with @

Differences with Lisp From the Paper

  • t is true
  • () is false
  • cond is if: (if guard then-action else-action)
  • car is head
  • cdr is tail
  • label is def
  • lambda is fn

Interoperability with JS

All references to JS objects and top level functions should be qualified with a js/ prefix:

(js/alert "hello world!")
(.log js/console "hello world!")

Properties are accessed just as functions for a read:

; returns the value of 'someId' element
(.value (.getElementById js/document "someId"))

and can be set by using them as functions with arguments:

; sets the value of 'someId' to "hey"
(.value (.getElementById js/document "someId") "hey")

Creation of objects is straighforward:

(new Date)

File Loading

Mineral code can be written in *.mrl files which will be then loaded using loadFiles(). Example:

<body onload="loadFiles('mrl/core.mrl', 'mrl/tests.mrl')">