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

              : (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/history
              The line editor's history file

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)