phlp - a toy lisp in PHP
Inspired by Lisp in Your Language, where the author writes a program to pass arrays as list-like structures in JavaScript, I decided to do something similar in PHP, as a challenge to try to learn a little bit more about LISP dialects.
In case its not entirely clear, much like its inspiration, this is a toy used for learning -- never, ever use in production. :)
The syntax ends up looking like this:
<?php phlp(['do', /* do will evaluate many statements in sequence */
/* math */
['-', 5, 3],
// => 2
['+', 1, 2, 3, 4],
// => 10
/* supports concat operator */
['.', 'foo', 'bar', 'baz'],
// => 'foobarbaz'
/* supports PHP functions */
['var_dump', ['implode', ' - ', ['bacon', 'gravy', 'eggs']]],
// => string(20) "bacon - gravy - eggs"
/* note, like operators, functions try to reduce or to operate on every member of an array by default */
/* 'puts' is shorthand for printf, but trys to stringify and print arrays as well */
['puts', ['implode', ' - ', ['strrev', 'bacon', 'gravy', 'eggs']]],
// => 'nocab - yvarg - sgge'
/* equality */
['if', ['=', 4, 3],
['puts','yep'],
['puts','nope']],
// => 'nope'
/* def is for naming vars, fn is for anonymous functions, defn is shorthand for both. */
['def', 'a', 2],
['puts', ['+', 'a', 5]],
// => 7
['def', 'greet',
['fn', ['planet', 'greeting'],
['puts', 'greeting', 'planet']]],
['greet', 'world', 'hello'],
// => 'hello'
// => 'world'
['defn', 'yell',
['greeting', 'planet'],
['puts', ['.', ['implode', ', ', ['strtoupper', 'greeting', 'planet']], '!!!']]],
['yell', 'hello', 'world'],
// => 'HELLO WORLD!!!'
]);
Include index.php in your script, and invoke using the phlp() function call.
An alternative usage is the repl, which loads an interactive shell with the script preloaded.
You can run this "repl" from the root of the repo like so:
./bin/repl