wisp: Whitespace to Lisp

Wisp basics

Wisp turns indentation into lisp expressions.
Why Wisp?
Get it
- from its Mercurial repository:
  hg clone https://hg.sr.ht/~arnebab/wisp
- Or via GNU Guix:
  guix install guile guile-wisp
- Or via the package guile-wisp-hg for Arch Linux.
- Or via ./configure; make install from the releases.
See more examples and tests.

Update (2022-02-04): Inspired by the FOSDEM talk Lisp, but Beautiful; Lisp for Everyone (video: lispforeveryone.webm) by Christine Lemmer-Webber, wisp-mode 0.3.0 now provides wisp-color-indentation-minor-mode — optional highlighting of the semantic indentation level using a light background color:

Also there is an experimental mode that highlights the current indentation level, but being experimental means that it might go away or receive bigger changes to behavior:

You can get wisp-mode directly from melpa.

If you have additional questions, see the FAQ
and chat in #guile at libre.chat.
That's it - have fun with wisp syntax!

Update (2021-12-20): Wisp 1.0.7 fixes a bug in 1.0.6 that broke the insta-repl with a lisp-style comment in a shell-script. You can again get a wisp shell with a single command on Guix:

guix environment --ad-hoc guile guile-wisp -- wisp

Wisp 1.0.6 enables using meta-commands in the wisp shell (REPL). To make that possible, a single space at the start of a chunk is ignored (this caused a syntax error in earlier versions). Also it ensures that (language wisp) is compiled when you run wisp If you have additional questions, see the Frequently asked Questions (FAQ) and chat in #guile at libre.chat.
That's it - have fun with wisp syntax!

Update (2021-05-21): If you use GNU Guix, you can get an instant wisp shell with a single command:

guix environment --ad-hoc guile guile-wisp -- wisp

That’s the guix wisp insta-REPL ☺

$ guix environment --ad-hoc guile guile-wisp -- wisp
GNU Guile 3.0.7
Copyright (C) 1995-2021 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

Guile comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details type `,show w'.
This program is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it
under certain conditions; type `,show c' for details.

Enter `,help' for help.
wisp@(guile-user)>

No need to install it into your system: with Guix Wisp is always at your fingertips when you need it.

Update (2021-05-02): Wisp 1.0.5 improves wisp-mode (support for imenu, thanks to Greg Reagle!), adds a test for receive, and fixes links in the documentation to point to hg.sr.ht/~arnebab/wisp.

Also it clears up license information, making it explicit that the project itself and the examples are licensed under GPLv3 or later while wisp as language and implementation of SRFI-119 as well as the tests and supporting files are licensed under the lax expat-license (thanks to Jan Wedekind for the permission!) to make it easier to embed Wisp in games that use Guile — for example Shitsumon, a game example written for the Tsukundere Visual Novel Engine.

And Tsukundere supports games written in wisp!

Also wisp-mode is available from melpa again.

If you want to see Wisp put to practical use for practical reproducible research (German article), for example in bioinformatics, have a look at the examples of the Guix Workflow Language. Deepest thanks to Ricardo Wurmus for making this a reality! This might turn wisp that I wrote just to do things right into my largest contribution to science ☺.

After installation, just run wisp to enter a wisp-shell (REPL).

For more info about Wisp 1.0.5, see the NEWS file.
To test wisp v1.0.5, install Guile 2.0.11 or later and bootstrap wisp:

wget https://www.draketo.de/software/wisp-1.0.5.tar.gz ; \
  tar xf wisp-1.0.5.tar.gz ; cd wisp-1.0.5/ ; \
  ./configure ; make check ; examples/newbase60.w 123

If it prints 23 (123 in NewBase60), your wisp is fully operational.
If you have additional questions, see the Frequently asked Questions (FAQ) and chat in #guile at freenode.
That's it - have fun with wisp syntax!

Update (2020-09-15): Wisp 1.0.3 provides a wisp binary to start a wisp repl or run wisp files, builds with Guile 3, and moved to sourcehut for libre hosting: hg.sr.ht/~arnebab/wisp.

After installation, just run wisp to enter a wisp-shell (REPL).

This release also ships wisp-mode 0.2.6 (fewer autoloads), ob-wisp 0.1 (initial support for org-babel), and additional examples. New auxiliary projects include wispserve for experiments with streaming and download-mesh via Guile, and wisp in conf:

conf new -l wisp PROJNAME

creates an autotools project with wisp, while

conf new -l wisp-enter PROJAME

creates a project with natural script writing and guile doctests set up. Both also install a script to run your project with minimal start time: I see 23ms to 27ms runtime for hello world with rare outliers at 100ms. The name of the script is the name of your project.

For more info about Wisp 1.0.3, see the NEWS file.
To test wisp v1.0.3, install Guile 2.0.11 or later and bootstrap wisp:

wget https://www.draketo.de/files/wisp-1.0.3.tar_.gz; \
  tar xf wisp-1.0.3.tar_.gz ; cd wisp-1.0.3/; \
  ./configure; make check; examples/newbase60.w 123

Update (2019-06-16): In c programming the uncommon way, specifically c-indent, tantalum is experimenting with combining wisp and sph-sc, which compiles scheme-like s-expressions to c. The result is a program written like this:

pre-include "stdio.h"

define (main argc argv) : int int char**
  declare i int
  printf "the number of arguments is %d\n" argc
  for : (set i 0) (< i argc) (set+ i 1)
    printf "arg %d is %s\n" (+ i 1) (array-get argv i)
  return 0 ;; code-snippet under GPLv3+

To me that looks so close to C that it took me a moment to realize that it isn't just using a parser which allows omitting some special syntax of C, but actually an implementation of a C-generator in Scheme (similar in spirit to cython, which generates C from Python), which results in code that looks like a more regular version of C without superfluous parens. Wisp really completes the round-trip from C over Scheme to something that looks like C but has all the regularity of Scheme, because all things considered, the code example is regular wisp-code. And it is awesome to see tantalum take up the tool I created and use it to experiment with ways to program that I never even imagined! ♡

TLDR: tantalum uses wisp for code that looks like C and compiles to C but has the regularity of Scheme!

Update (2019-06-02): The repository at https://www.draketo.de/proj/wisp/ is stale at the moment, because the staticsite extension I use to update it was broken by API changes and I currently don't have the time to fix it. Therefore until I get it fixed, the canonical repository for wisp is https://hg.sr.ht/~arnebab/wisp/. I'm sorry for that. I would prefer to self-host it again, but the time to read up what i have to adjust blocks that right now (typically the actual fix only needs a few lines). A pull-request which fixes the staticsite extension for modern Mercurial would be much appreciated!

Update (2019-02-08): wisp v1.0 released as announced at FOSDEM. Wisp the language is complete:

display "Hello World!"      ↦ (display "Hello World!")

And it achieves its goal:

“Wisp allows people to see code how Lispers perceive it. Its structure becomes apparent.” — Ricardo Wurmus at FOSDEM

Tooling, documentation, and porting of wisp are still work in progress, but before I go on, I want thank the people from the readable lisp project. Without our initial shared path, and without their encouragement, wisp would not be here today. Thank you! You're awesome!

With this release it is time to put wisp to use. To start your own project, see the tutorial Starting a wisp project and the wisp tutorial. For more info, see the NEWS file. To test wisp v1.0, install Guile 2.0.11 or later and bootstrap wisp:

wget https://web.archive.org/web/20170219091257/https://bitbucket.org/ArneBab/wisp/downloads/wisp-1.0.tar.gz; \
  tar xf wisp-1.0.tar.gz ; cd wisp-1.0/; \
  ./configure; make check; examples/newbase60.w 123

Update (2019-01-27): wisp v0.9.9.1 released which includes the emacs support files missed in v0.9.9, but excludes unnecessary files which increased the release size from 500k to 9 MiB (it's now back at about 500k). To start your own wisp-project, see the tutorial Starting a wisp project and the wisp tutorial. For more info, see the NEWS file. To test wisp v0.9.9.1, install Guile 2.0.11 or later and bootstrap wisp:

wget https://web.archive.org/web/20170219091257/https://bitbucket.org/ArneBab/wisp/downloads/wisp-0.9.9.1.tar.gz; \
  tar xf wisp-0.9.9.1.tar.gz ; cd wisp-0.9.9.1/; \
  ./configure; make check; examples/newbase60.w 123