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Librep (or sometimes rep) implements a lisp dialect, and is the backend of sawfish.
Librep development was restarted in mid 2008 by User:Flashrider after years of halt.
Download[]
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Overview[]
Librep is a shared library implementing a Lisp dialect that is lightweight, reasonably fast, and highly extensible. It had been authored by John Harper. It contains an interpreter, byte-code compiler and virtual machine. Applications may use the interpreter as an extension language, or it may be used for standalone scripts.
Rep was originally inspired by Emacs Lisp. However one of the main deficiencies of elisp--the reliance on dynamic scope--has been removed. Also, rep only has a single namespace for symbols.
Librep is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License, copyright John Harper, and is known to compile on at least the following architectures: Alpha AMD64 ARM ARMEL HPPA IA-32 IA-64 M68k MIPS MIPSEL PowerPC PowerPC-64 S390 SPARC X86 (according to Debian documentation).
How can I learn rep? How does it differ from other lisps?[]
The original librep was strongly influenced by emacs lisp, or elisp. Later, it has gotten modules from Scheme48, so librep is a kind of mixture of both.
Elisp docs don't explain modules, but Scheme tutorials don't have much or no informations on mechanisms like hooks, plists, or docstrings.
Librep >= 0.91.0 (released Sep 2010) info manual has a section 'Crash course for Elisp users'.
Lisp introductions[]
Emacs lisp[]
Elisp intro is available in various formats.
Scheme[]
Teach Yourself Scheme in Fixnum Days is a quick intro geared at experienced programmers. HTML tarball available.
SICP, or Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, is a book on programming in general, and uses scheme for presentation. Free online version is available.
R5RS, or Revised5 Report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme is a refernce, but only 50 pages long. PDF, HTML tarball, and so on. Newer version, R6RS is longer, and the differnce does not matter so much to librep.
Other materials[]
For common lisp, Practical Common Lisp is an online introduction, and both Common Lisp the Language, 2nd Edition and Common Lisp HyperSpec are online refernce.
More scheme books are found here.
Difference to other lisps[]