A jet black raven on a white field.

Getting close to being ready for prime time

About

Cozenage is a Scheme-derived, LISP-like language which provides a modest core of built-in procedures and is extended by a growing standard library of additional functionality implemented as ‘hot-pluggable’ dynamic modules. While Cozenage agrees with the formal R5RS/R7RS standards inasmuch as possible, it is not intended to be fully-compliant, and deviates from the standards in many non-trivial ways. These differences, and a justifications for them, will be documented as I find the time. That said, anyone experienced with Scheme will find Cozenage quite familiar.

Cozenage has:

  • The typical menu of disjoint primitive objects: number, string, char, symbol, pair, null, vector, boolean, port, and procedure.

  • A selection of bytevector objects implemented using native C type arrays: u8, s8, u16, s16, u32, and s32.

  • Full ‘numeric tower’ of derived types including integer, rational, real, and complex numbers.

  • Exact and inexact numbers.

  • Proper tail-call optimization where applicable.

  • Garbage collection.

  • A REPL with multi-line input editing, command history, and tab-autocompletion.

  • UTF-8 Unicode support.

  • eval/apply procedures for interpreting data as executable code.

Typical Scheme features that Cozenage does NOT have:

  • Arbitrary size and precision integers and real numbers. Currently, the magnitude of numbers is limited by the underlying C long long and long double types provided by the platform. While I do intend to implement ‘bugnums’ and ‘bigfloats’ at some point, it is somewhat low-priority currently.

  • call/cc and first-class continuations. I’m not likely to ever implement this. Rather, I am more likely to implement control flow patterns typically implemented via call/cc as primitive syntax.

  • Hygienic macros. I will likely implement this at some point, but it is low-priority.

  • Quasiquotation. Currently, only standard quotation is supported.

  • Delayed, or lazy evaluation. On the todo, but low-priority.

Attention

This project is under active development. The documentation and the code itself changes every day. Be sure to pull from Github and build often to get the latest version.

This documentation is organized into three main types. Howtos are goal-oriented documentation. They have specific goals, and demonstrate how to achieve that goal. Tutorials are knowledge-oriented documentation. They don’t have specific goals other than to introduce and demonstrate various concepts to work towards building general knowledge. The Reference is a single document which exhaustively details all the types, procedures, syntax, special forms, libraries, and even the underlying C internals of Cozenage. If you know what you are looking for, see if there is a Howto on the topic, else search for the topic in the reference. If you have no specific goal, and just want to learn more about Scheme and/or Cozenage, try a tutorial.

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