Technoblogy

CRANK

14th August 2019The Visible Lisp Computer is a Lisp interpreter that displays the contents of the Lisp workspace on an OLED display, so you can see program execution and garbage collection in real time: Visible Lisp Computer displays the contents of the Lisp workspace on an OLED display as it runs.It's a special version of my uLisp interpreter for ARM boards [1], designed to run on an Adafruit ItsyBitsy M0, or an ATSAMD21E on a prototyping board, interfaced to an I2C OLED display.For example, when you evaluate a recursive function, such as the Fibonnaci function, you can see the memory being allocated to perform the calculation, and garbage collections clearing unused memory. Apart from being fun, it's educational, giving an insight into how a language with garbage collection works.IntroductionThe Visible Lisp Computer runs on an Adafruit ItsyBitsy M0, which is an ideal ATSAMD21 board for running uLisp. It's available from Adafruit [2], or Pimoroni in the UK [3].The Lisp workspace is …