Relationship to Loon

Relationship to Loon#

Loon is an experimental Lisp dialect by ~fodwyt-ragful that compiles to Nock. frodwith describes it as a “lambda-delta calculus”: the untyped lambda calculus augmented with Nock’s noun operations—cons, axis reads, edits, equality, increment, depth test, conditional branching, and hints—as language-level primitives. Delta abstractions are Nock formulas.

Loon uses Lisp-style S-expression syntax with square brackets for cell literals, lowercase symbols, and _ for wildcards in binding patterns. Its most distinctive feature is the split between two forms of abstraction: fn produces an ordinary closure, while dfn produces a bare Nock formula. The latter enables a clean module pattern in which a top-level main form is itself a Nock formula that takes its dependencies as an argument, with modules composed via Nock’s opcode 2.

At the current time, Loon is a single-author prototype.

Example#

This Loon program:

(focus a 42 a)

binds a to 42 and returns it, compiling directly to Nock opcode 7 (compose):

[7 [1 42] 0 1]

The bound value becomes the new subject ([1 42]), and the body retrieves it with [0 1]. Loon’s binding forms map onto Nock’s structural opcodes with no runtime machinery in between.

Relationship to Loon

Contents

Relationship to Loon#

Example#

Further Reading#