User talk:Jni
Add topicWelcome
[edit]Jni, welcome to Wikinews! I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few good links for newcomers:
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Wikilisp
[edit]Sorry you were disappointed to find wikilisp isn't a full Lisp dialect; it is, after all, a very specialized Lisp; I've found it a rather unusual exercise in PL design. It's not meant to be complete in itself, rather it's meant to synergize with other things doable with wiki markup, filling in gaps in what can be done. You can't write a recursive definition of factorial (user-defined-procedure calls can't be nested beyond a fixed depth, currently 4), but it's very handy if you want to, say, modify the raw wiki markup of a page by selectively rewriting certain kinds of template calls. In the particular code you tried out, there's let but it only does one binding (so it's just (let (<variable> <value>) <body>)); there is indeed no format or quote; and, most weirdly for a Lisp hacker (which I admit to being), there are lists but not pairs, with list elements accessed by nth rather than car/cdr. Thanks to my dialog tools, though, there's an interactive Lisp evaluator accessible from {{evalx}} and from Module:Wikilisp. :-) --Pi zero (talk) 19:44, 15 November 2016 (UTC)
- Thanks for explanation. My lisp skills are very limited but I noticed this indeed looks somewhat odd dialect. This is not to say it cannot be useful for parsing wiki markup and for its other intended uses. I guess it is mandatory to disallow general recursion to defend server resources against DOS-attacks. I'll add the task of learning more about this WikiLisp thing to my todo list. Is it easy to utilize this and related machinery in some other project than here in wikinews? jni (talk) 19:56, 15 November 2016 (UTC)
- My plan has been to port the tools I'm developing first to en.wb, where I'm also an admin, and by doing so learn what the problems are with porting them from one project to another. I have, in fact, already ported wikilisp to en.wb, and am using it for a few things there; I'm hoping to port the dialog tools too, of course, but have been letting them develop a bit more here while I'm doing other infrastructure work on Wikibooks (for which I wanted wikilisp, hence the earlier port of that). My hope is that the dialog tools will be pretty straightforward to port; I discuss that at, er (hunts for the right link), MediaWiki talk:Dialog/receive#Dialog installation. --Pi zero (talk) 20:23, 15 November 2016 (UTC)