Operating System Interaction


One essential part of bootstrapping a language is to give it proper abilities for opening, reading, and writing files. This means wrapping all the C functions such as fread, fwrite, fgetc, etc in Lisp equivalents. This is a fairly straight forward task, but does require writing quite a large number of wrapper functions. This is why we’ve not done it for our language so far.

On a similar note it would be great to give our language access to whatever operating systems calls are appropriate. We should give it the ability to change directory, list files in a directory and that sort of thing. This is an easy task but again requires a lot of wrapping of C functions. It is essential for any real practical use of this language as a scripting language.

People who wish to make use of their language for doing simple scripting tasks and string manipulation may be interested in implementing this project.