Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!samsung!eileen!gjc
From: gjc@mga.COM (George J. Carrette)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: a plug for a very small lisp: SIOD
Message-ID: <115@eileen.mga.com>
Date: 15 Dec 89 03:08:40 GMT
Organization: MGA, Inc.
Lines: 22

Suffice it to say that lisp intepreters are popular as extension languages
and/or applications glue/prototyping mechanisms.

Problem 1: There are usually a truckload of build-in subroutines which may
or may not reflect how you want to program *your* application.
Problem 2: Size and complexity. Even the so-called "small" lisps tend to be
multi-source-file things, with their own idea of "main-program" structure.
Problem 3: Adding new lisp callable subroutines is usually a royal pain,
because of having to deal with garbage-collection related issues. 
Problem 4: A lisp callable subroutine is usually not callable from C
without passing arguments in some strange ideosyncratic manner.

To illustrate that these problems can be solved I present SIOD:
(Scheme in One Day). Read/Eval/Print/Load/Save/GC are all in a single
small source file without a main program. The source is less than 40 Kbytes,
and on a VAX/VMS system compiles into 14 Kbytes of executable code.
(The optional main program in a different file is but a few lines long).

You may try it out for yourself by anonymous ftp to bu-it.bu.edu, cd src/gjc,
get siod-v2.3-shar.

-gjc