lang/owl-lisp 0.2.2 NetBSD

Owl Lisp is a purely functional dialect of Scheme. It is based on the applicable subset of R7RS standard, extending it mainly with threads and data structures necessary for purely functional operation. Owl can be used on most UNIX-like systems, such as Linux, BSDs and OS X. Programs are typically compiled via C to standalone binaries, so Owl isn't needed to run programs written in it.

Owl project originally got started both as an attempt to extend R5RS Scheme with some necessary features, such as threads and modules, and as an experiment on how being purely functional influences the runtime and use of an applicative order purely functional language. While things have been added to Scheme, Owl tries to keep the core language as simple as possible.

Implementationwise the goal was to get a small portable system which could be used to ship programs easily. This is currently accomplished by using a small register-based virtual machine, which can be extended with program-specific instructions to reduce interpretive overhead.