Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!mit-eddie!media-lab!straz
From: straz@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU (Steve Strassmann)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: a quickie lisp
Message-ID: <5208@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU>
Date: 13 Feb 91 01:34:45 GMT
Organization: MIT Media Lab, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 14


Systems like unix seem to encourage building little stand-alone
applications with names that sound like gastric disorders, like grep,
wc, and biff.

Has anyone ever made a lisp-like compiler that produces relatively
small stand-alone executables? Of course, there would be appropriate
restrictions on the language, or even the ability to cons freely. But
perhaps there's a large class of useful small applications that could
be written with such a system, even with those limitations.

I guess I'd like to be able to write utilities that could be used by
others without requiring them to start up a huge lisp image each time,
which is especially daunting if they don't know any lisp.