What a self-important idea, and executed so poorly. It is no surprise to do further research and see the name of Paul Graham attached.
It proposes a purely theoretical approach, yet is mired in practicality. There are character literals, why? And streams? Having stdin and stdout? Keeping the dotted syntax for lists is also curious. I imagine a purely theoretical lisp would define lists as the intrinsic data-type without care for their representation. The names are also atrocious. Many scavenged from lisp (with slightly altered definitions make them seem different) and a lot of the rest symptomatic of the allergy to vowels that some programmers develop (if I ever name a function "bqexpair1", I want someone to give me a good telling off). It makes no sense why there is so much of it also. If we were talking purely formalisms, why not just describe the formal portion of the language and leave the rest as an exercise to the reader? The only reason is to make the language easier to code in which seems entirely informal.
The end result seems to just be "lisp again". I couldn't have possibly determined that some process was followed to create this language if it wasn't spelled out int the preamble.
It proposes a purely theoretical approach, yet is mired in practicality. There are character literals, why? And streams? Having stdin and stdout? Keeping the dotted syntax for lists is also curious. I imagine a purely theoretical lisp would define lists as the intrinsic data-type without care for their representation. The names are also atrocious. Many scavenged from lisp (with slightly altered definitions make them seem different) and a lot of the rest symptomatic of the allergy to vowels that some programmers develop (if I ever name a function "bqexpair1", I want someone to give me a good telling off). It makes no sense why there is so much of it also. If we were talking purely formalisms, why not just describe the formal portion of the language and leave the rest as an exercise to the reader? The only reason is to make the language easier to code in which seems entirely informal.
The end result seems to just be "lisp again". I couldn't have possibly determined that some process was followed to create this language if it wasn't spelled out int the preamble.