NAME

       pil, picolisp - a fast, lightweight Lisp interpreter

SYNOPSIS

       pil [arguments ...] [-] [arguments ...] [+]
       picolisp [arguments ...] [-] [arguments ...] [+]

DESCRIPTION

       PicoLisp  is  a  Lisp  interpreter with a small memory footprint, yet relatively high execution speed. It
       combines an elegant and powerful language with built-in database functionality.

       pil is the startup front-end for the interpreter. It takes care of starting the binary  base  system  and
       loading a useful runtime environment.

       picolisp is just the bare interpreter binary. It is usually called in stand-alone scripts, using the she-
       bang notation in the first line, passing the minimal environment in lib.l and loading additional files as
       needed:

              #!/usr/bin/picolisp /usr/lib/picolisp/lib.l
              (load "@ext.l" "myfiles/lib.l" "myfiles/foo.l")
              (do ... something ...)
              (bye)

INVOCATION

       PicoLisp  has  no pre-defined command line flags; applications are free to define their own. Any built-in
       or user-level Lisp function can be invoked from the command line by prefixing it with a hyphen.  Examples
       for  built-in  functions  useful  in this context are version (print the version number) or bye (exit the
       interpreter). Therefore, a minimal call to print  the  version  number  and  then  immediately  exit  the
       interpreter would be:

              $ pil -version -bye

       Any  other  argument (not starting with a hyphen) should be the name of a file to be loaded. If the first
       character of a path or file name is an at-mark, it will be substituted with the path to the  installation
       directory.

       All arguments are evaluated from left to right, then an interactive read-eval-print loop is entered (with
       a colon as prompt).

       A single hyphen stops the evaluation of the rest of the command line, so that the remaining arguments may
       be processed under program control.

       If  the  very  last  command  line  argument is a single plus character, debugging mode is switched on at
       interpreter startup, before evaluating any of the command line arguments. A minimal  interactive  session
       is started with:

              $ pil +

       Here  you  can  access  the  reference  manual (expects the shell variable BROWSER to be set, defaults to
       "w3m")

              : (doc)

       and the online documentation for most functions,

              : (doc 'vi)

       or directly inspect their sources:

              : (vi 'doc)

       The interpreter can be terminated with

              : (bye)

       or by typing Ctrl-D.

FILES

       Runtime files are maintained in the ~/.pil directory:

       ~/.pil/tmp/<pid>/
              Process-local temporary directories

       ~/.pil/rc
              Loaded after interpreter startup

       ~/.pil/viprc
              Loaded by the Vip editor

BUGS

       PicoLisp doesn't try to protect you from every possible programming error ("You asked  for  it,  you  got
       it").

AUTHOR

       Alexander Burger <abu@software-lab.de>

RESOURCES

       Home page: http://home.picolisp.com
       Download: http://www.software-lab.de/down.html

                                                                                                     PICOLISP(1)