The Risper language

Risper is a language in which I experiment with features that seem interesting to me. Perhaps I wish they were more common in the languages I use.

It is a Lisp, influenced by languages sich as D, Groovy, Python, and Javascript.

Characteristics:

• interpreted, with late binding of all things

• uses its own lists to represent its own code, making it fully reflexive

• supports either prefix notation, or infix notation:

  • arg1.f(arg2) is rewritten to f(arg1 arg2)
  • the . can be omitted if the function name is not alphabetic: arg1 + arg2 is equivalent to + (arg1 arg2), a=[5 6] is equivalent to =(a [5 6])

• identifiers are any set of Unicode alphanumeric characters starting with an alphabetic character

• symbols are identifiers made of non-alphanumeric identifiers

• case-insensitive

• automatic typing with optional type declaration

To risp: to rub together, to rasp or grate (Wiktionary)