OK, here's another idea, although it might be outside of the scope of a
lisp-reader:
Dynamic languages such as perl or ruby have a feature where an attempt to
call an undefined function results in the interpreter calling a catch-all
function, called method_missing in ruby, and AUTOLOAD in perl. This
functionality would be extremely useful for a lisp shell scripting
language, so that if you attempted to execute a function that was
undefined, you could write the catch-all function to instead execute a
shell command using the function's arguments converted to strings, then
return the command's exit code. This would allow seamless mixing of
functions and shell commands. BASH does something similar to this-- you can
define functions that operate like commands. When BASH interprets a
command, it first checks to see if there's a matching function with that
name. If not, it tries to run it as a command.
Like I said, this might be outside the scope of this project, and would
probably make more sense as a feature of the language instead of the
syntax. But it could conceivably be implemented as part of the reader, if
the reader were capable of keeping track of which symbols were defined and
undefined in any given context, similar to how a hygienic macro expander
works. If a catch-all function has been declared, a call to an undefined
function would be replaced with a call to the catch-all function.
The benefit of this feature for a lisp shell would be seamless command
execution, without having to prefix the command with "run" or some other
function name.
OK, enough crazy talk for now :)
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