Re: Lark - A surface syntax for Common Lisp

> On 14 Feb 2026, at 20:40, Gerry Weaver (as gerryw at compvia dot com) <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> Here is a rough description of the syntax. It is still evolving a
> little, but mostly stable.

Looks very lua-like, was the first thought that I had looking at it. But I wonder why you had to come up with your own syntax, rather than use lua syntax directly and compile it into lisp? Then you could avail of all the existing development tools for lua, syntax highlighting, refactoring, etc. saving you a lot of work building your own linters, formatters, all that (although I cannot vouch for the quality of those tools for lua as it is a minor language).

Was it a lack of some specific features in lua, that prompted you to roll out your own syntax?

For me personally macros is the most important feature of Lisp, I can live with pretty much everything else that other languages have. Nowadays most languages can do a lot of tricks that were once Lisp specific, like collection iterators, functions as first class citizens, and even REPL, although Lisp does the latter still better than most, I find. Macros also do exist in some (D lang, for example), and while that is a notable improvement over C-like macros, they are significantly less usable than those of Lisp and that what keeps me coming back, half of my Lisp code is macros, if not more.






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