[Openmcl-devel] Running ccl as a shebang script

[Ron Garret]

On Feb 16, 2017, at 7:16 AM, Andrew Shalit <alms at clozure.com> wrote:

> 
>> On Feb 16, 2017, at 10:12 AM, Ron Garret <ron at flownet.com> wrote:
>> The reason I want this is because I want to recruit new Lisp programmers, and when one of them says, “I use Python, and I can do this:
> 
> 
> Working on a new project? Anything you can talk about?

Yes and yes, though it’s a very long and convoluted story about how I got to this particular problem.  I’m cc’ing the list just in case anyone else is interested.

I’ve been working on cryptography and secure communications.  Two years ago I wrote a PGP replacement that runs in a browser:

https://github.com/Spark-Innovations/SC4

The problem with PGP is that it doesn’t have forward secrecy, so I decided to add a double-ratchet.  I started with a Lisp implementation:

https://github.com/rongarret/tweetnacl/blob/master/ratchet.lisp

which I now need to convert to Javascript.  Being the lazy good-for-nothing layabout that I am I didn’t want to do the conversion manually, so I started thinking of ways to automate the process.  Unfortunately, my code makes heavy use of generic functions, so there is no straightforward way to do it.

I the course of pursuing various alternatives, I decided that one of the things I wanted was “Javascript macros” which I am implementing in Common Lisp.  Then I thought that if I get it to work others may want to use it too.  But JS people tend to be allergic to Lisp so I decided to try to package it up as a fully turnkey system, which led me to think about running CCL as a shell script.  All that meshed well with a general and ongoing interest in Lisp advocacy and pedagogy, which has led to other works-in-progress like these:

https://github.com/rongarret/ergolib
https://github.com/rongarret/BWFP

rg