I read some interesting feedback on reddit.com. Although I havent seriously looked into it, IronLisp would ideally compliant to some form of LISP. That leaves me 2 choices: Common LISP and Scheme. As for the former, there are just under 1000 functions in the ‘spec’. Learning them and implementing them would be ongoing venture beyond my expected lifetime. As for the latter (Scheme), it presents a much cleaner approach, with almost a tiny ‘core’ and using that as building block.

Another aspect mentioned was library support. Again, learning the entire LISP library(s) to get an idea of the implementation will be too great task for me. Having worked (almost exclusively) on the .NET Framework ‘library’ for the last 6 years, it is pretty much the only library I am really comfortable with. My idea with IronLisp is to let the .NET framework provide all the common libraries, and hence any .NET user can just learn a new syntax to use it practically. That will also keep IronLisp small and manageable.

Getting back to Scheme. Ideally IronLisp at some future time, will support/comply to some degree of Scheme, or will have a compatibility mode, or have macros to make it syntax (and functionally) compatible. With this in hand, hopefully IronLisp would be capable of running Scheme libraries.

Unfortunately, Scheme has no defined test suite, but the specification is rather unambiguous, and smaller in total than the Common LISP’s index!