Overview

Programming languages should be designed not by piling feature on top of feature, but by removing the weaknesses and restrictions that make additional features appear necessary.

Revised⁷ Report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme

Meevax is an implementation of Lisp-1 programming language, supporting the latest Scheme language standard and some SRFIs (SRFI; Scheme requests for implementation). This implementation is focused on integration with modern C++ and practicality: it not only works as an interpreter with support for the latest Scheme standard, but also provides a flexible Lisp-1 kernel as a C++ library. The library is installed as a CMake package for easy linking, and any C++ classes can be used from Lisp-1 scripts via simple stubs.

Releases

Latest release is here.

Features

• Traditional SECD machine [2].
• Low-level hygienic macro system, known as syntactic closures [4, 6] and explicit renaming [5]. For these, the well-known macro transformers sc-macro-transformer, rsc-macro-transformer and er-macro-transformer from the library (meevax macro-transformer) are provided. Note that these are non-Scheme standards.
• C++ friendly precise garbage collection [10, 11]

Standards

Meevax can be used as an interpreter that supports the Scheme standard specified by the following report:

• Revised⁴ Report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme (R4RS) [5]
• Revised⁵ Report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme (R5RS) [9]
• Revised⁷ Report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme (R7RS) [13]

Procedures for each standard are provided by the following R7RS-style libraries:

Language	Library name
R4RS	(scheme r4rs)
R5RS	(scheme r5rs)
R7RS	(scheme base) (scheme box) (scheme case-lambda) (scheme char) (scheme complex) (scheme cxr) (scheme eval) (scheme file) (scheme inexact) (scheme lazy) (scheme list) (scheme load) (scheme process-context) (scheme read) (scheme repl) (scheme time) (scheme write)

SRFIs

Number	Title	Library name	Note
0	Feature-based conditional expansion construct	(srfi 0)	R7RS 4.2.1
1	List Library	(srfi 1)	(scheme list)
4	Homogeneous numeric vector datatypes	(srfi 4)	R7RS 6.9
6	Basic String Ports	(srfi 6)	R7RS 6.13
8	receive: Binding to multiple values	(srfi 8)
9	Defining Record Types	(srfi 9)	R7RS 5.5
10	#, external form
11	Syntax for receiving multiple values	(srfi 11)	R7RS 4.2.2
16	Syntax for procedures of variable arity	(srfi 16)	R7RS 4.2.9
23	Error reporting mechanism	(srfi 23)	R7RS 6.11
30	Nested Multi-line Comments		R7RS 2.2
31	A special form rec for recursive evaluation	(srfi 31)
34	Exception Handling for Programs	(srfi 34)	R7RS 6.11
38	External Representation for Data With Shared Structure	(srfi 38)	R7RS 6.13.3
39	Parameter objects	(srfi 39)	R7RS 4.2.6
45	Primitives for Expressing Iterative Lazy Algorithms	(srfi 45)	R7RS 4.2.5
62	S-expression comments		R7RS 2.2
78	Lightweight testing	(srfi 78)	Except check-ec
87	=> in case clauses		R7RS 4.2.1
98	An interface to access environment variables	(srfi 98)	R7RS 6.14
111	Boxes	(srfi 111)	(scheme box)
149	Basic syntax-rules template extensions	(srfi 149)	R7RS 4.3.2

Installation

Requirements

• GCC (>= 9.4.0) or Clang (>= 11.0.0)
• CMake (>= 3.16.3)
• GNU Make
• GNU Binutils
• GNU Multiple Precision Arithmetic Library (GMP)

Install

cmake -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cd build
make package
sudo apt install build/meevax_0.5.223_amd64.deb

or

cmake -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cd build
make install

Uninstall

If you installed with sudo apt install,

sudo apt remove meevax

or if you installed with make install,

sudo rm -rf /usr/local/bin/meevax
sudo rm -rf /usr/local/include/meevax
sudo rm -rf /usr/local/lib/libmeevax*
sudo rm -rf /usr/local/share/meevax

CMake targets

Target Name	Description
all	Build shared-library libmeevax.0.5.223.so and executable meevax
test	Test executable meevax
package	Generate debian package meevax_0.5.223_amd64.deb
install	Copy files into /usr/local directly

Usage

Usage:
  meevax [OPTION...] [FILE...]

Options:
  -e, --evaluate=STRING  read and evaluate STRING on interaction-environment
  -h, --help             display this help and exit
  -i, --interactive      enter an interactive session
  -l, --load=FILE        load FILE into interaction-environment
  -v, --version          display version information and exit
  -w, --write=STRING     same as `(write (read STRING))`

License

See LICENSE.

References

[1] John McCarthy. Recursive functions of symbolic expressions and their computation by machine, Part I. Communications of the ACM, 3(4):184--195, 1960.

[2] Peter J. Landin. The Mechanical Evaluation of Expressions. The Computor Journal, 6(4):308--320, 1964.

[3] Peter Henderson. Functional Programming: Application and Implementation. Prentice Hall, 1980.

[4] Alan Bawden and Jonathan Rees. Syntactic Closures. In LFP '88: Proceedings of the 1988 ACM Conference on LISP and Functional Programming, pages 86--95, 1988.

[5] William Clinger and Jonathan Rees (Editors). Revised⁴ Report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme. ACM SIGPLAN LISP Pointers, IV(3):1--55, 1991.

[6] Chris Hanson. A Syntactic Closures Macro Facility. ACM SIGPLAN LISP Pointers, IV(4):9--16, 1991.

[7] William Clinger. Hygienic Macros Through Explicit Renaming. ACM SIGPLAN LISP Pointers, IV(4):25--28, 1991.

[8] William Clinger and Jonathan Rees. Macros That Work. In POPL '91: Proceedings of the 18th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, pages 155--162, 1991.

[9] Rechard Kelsey, William Clinger, and Jonathan Rees (Editors). Revised⁵ Report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme. ACM SIGPLAN Notices, 33(9):26--76, 1998.

[10] William E. Kempf. A garbage collection framework for C++, 2001.

[11] William E. Kempf. A garbage collection framework for C++ - Part II, 2001.

[12] Michael D. Adams and R. Kent Dybvig. Efficient Nondestructive Equality Checking for Trees and Graphs. In ICFP '08: Proceedings of the 13th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming, pages 179--188, 2008.

[13] Alex Shinn, John Cowan, and Arthur A. Gleckler (Editors). Revised⁷ Report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme. Technical report, http://www.scheme-reports.org/, 2013.