miniblog.

One interesting property of both stdin/stdout based REPLs and RPC based REPLs is that they need to support asynchronous events. In both these programs, I don't need to wait until the function is done to see the output printed. It's not sufficient to read-eval-wait-print-loop.

I have a theory: Suppose I created a language Foo that printed execution time at termination: $ ./hello Hello World! (Finished in 0.6 seconds) I'm sure that Foo developers would be particularly sensitive to performance (for better and worse).

When I started out writing lisp, I found the distinction between foo and 'foo tricky to grasp. It bothered me that 'foo wasn't printed 'foo. I think this is easier to learn when symbols are printed differently. If 'foo is printed user::foo it's easier to grasp what a symbol is.