muSE - muvee Symbolic Expressions

0.1a

muSE is a portable compact lisp dialect that is flexible enough to be used as a data format as well as a scripting language. Here is a list of muSE features -

• Very simple, general, structured data format based on lists
• Supports symbols, integers, floats, strings and lists
• Main abstraction mechanism is the closure
• A simple object system for OOP
• Small code foot-print (45kB for full interpreter)
• Simple garbage collector (< 1ms for 60000 cells)
• Simple C integration API for compute-intensive algorithms

Basic objects

Everything in muSE is built from the following set of objects -

• Decimal numbers -

   10, 23, -57, etc.
  

• Hexadecimal numbers -

   0xffee, 0xABcd, etc. 
  

  upto 64-bits.
• Fractional numbers -

   0.1, 3.1415, -2.71828, .1e-5, -.53e10 etc. 
  

  .
  • Constant fractions such as 4/3 and -15/36 are supported for reading as well.
• Strings -

   "Hello world!", "Hello ""Kumar""!", etc. 
  

  . Use a pair of double quotes to embed a single double quote character into a string. (There are no other escape codes.)
• Symbols -

   hello, WORLD, <DouglasAdams>, Piglet*, etc. 
  

  (i.e. any contiguous set of characters that doesn't start with a number.)
• Lists -

   (1 2 3), (hello world 42), (numbers ("PI = " 3.1415) ("e = " 2.718)) 
  

Notations

Apart from the notation for objects in the previous section, some speial cases follow -

• Falsehood is expressed using the empty list (). Anything else goes for truth.
• You can "quote" an expression if you do not want it to be evaluated. You do that by placing a single quote mark before the expression. For example :

   '(hello "muSE") 
  

  is the quoted list

   (hello "muSE") 
  

  . If you'd used the second unquoted form instead of the first, muSE will try to lookup the function represented by the symbol hello and evaluate it, supplying the rest of the list as arguments.
• The list notation is an abbreviation of the fundamental list construction operation called "cons". "cons" takes two objects and constrcuts a pair out of them. Such a pair is notated as (a . b). A list is made out of such pairs like this -

   (a . (b . (c . (d . ())))) 
  

  where () is the NIL or empty list. This list is abbreviated as

   (a b c d) 
  

• It is possible to have something else instead of the () at the end of the list. This is notated as

   (a b c . d) 
  

  which stands for

   (a . (b . (c . d))) 
  

  , and is not a proper list.

muSE language

Structuring code

• define, let, do
• fn, fn:
• case
• while, for
• if, cond

Mathematical operators

• Binary operators
  • +, -, *, /
  • %, i/, pow
• Unary operators
  • trunc
  • sqrt, log, log10, exp
  • sin, cos, tab, asin, acos, atan
  • sinh, cosh, tanh,
  • fabs, floor, ceil
• Other functions
  • rand

Object system

• class
• new
• <-
• ->

Input and output

• print
• write
• read
• open-file

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