Arc is released

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As one or two of my readers may know, Arc is a project by Paul Graham to produce a new Lisp/Scheme dialect for the future. Up till now details about it have been very sparse, but today the first version was released.

From the notes:

Arc embodies just about every form of political incorrectness possible in a programming language. It doesn’t have strong typing, or even type declarations; it uses overlays on hash tables instead of conventional objects; its macros are unhygienic; it doesn’t distinguish between falsity and the empty list, or between form and content in web pages; it doesn’t have modules or any predefined form of encapsulation except closures; it doesn’t support any character sets except ascii. Such things may have their uses, but there’s also a place for a language that skips them, just as there is a place in architecture for markers as well as laser printers.

Sounds like a combo of JavaScript and Common Lisp to me, though I’m slightly disappointed about the (current) use of ASCII as the only charset.

When I’ve played with it a bit I may post more.

Get it here!

Update: here’s a tutorial

Joost.