This article aims to revive Lisp programming language for native, interactive and incremental microcontroller (MCU) program development by running a dialect of Lisp programming (PicoLisp) as virtual machine on the target. It also demonstrates the power of Lisp through execution of expressive Lisp programs on a 32-bit MCU.
Lisp programming offers a practical mathematical notation to write computer programs, mostly influenced by lambda calculus. It is still the most-favoured programming language for artificial intelligence research.
Dynamic languages like Lisp have been in existence as a versatile tool for rapid application development. Many interesting, practical embedded solutions have been developed so far with such languages, supported as part of a virtual machine (VM). Fig. 1 shows the system architecture of a natively-programmable, digitally-controlled system.
With the above architecture, it is possible to write abstract, self-adapting, middle-level drivers for hardware modules on the MCU. This enables the possibility of platform-independent, native embedded software development.
Lisp programming is the second-oldest high-level programming language (the first being FORTRAN). Linked lists are one of its major data structures. A program written in Lisp is constructed with lists. One of the most interesting properties of this language is its homo-iconic nature.
Although projects like PICOBIT and ARMPIT Scheme already implement a compact Lisp programming language for an MCU, there are many reasons to consider PicoLisp for programming MCUs.
PicoLisp is constructed as a VM. It is written in portable C and is easily extendable. After much research and programming to narrow down on a Lisp programming implementation, PicoLisp was chosen as a VM for the following reasons:
1. Dynamic data types and structures
2. Formally homo-iconic
3. Functional programming paradigm
4. An interactive REPL(read-eval-print loop)
5. Pilog, a declarative language with semantics of Prolog in PicoLisp
6. Small memory footprint
7. Permissive, non-copyleft free software licence
At the lowest level, PicoLisp programs are constructed from a single data structure called cell. A cell is a pair of machine words, which are traditionally called CAR and CDR in Lisp programming terminology. These words can represent either a numeric value (scalar) or address of another cell (pointer). All higher-level data structures are built out of these cells.
Basic data types that PicoLisp supports are numbers, symbols and lists. As a result, it is one of the fastest Lisp dialects available, since only fewer options are checked at runtime to parse a value.
