Yet another Hacker News

64 points AlexeyBrin 4 days ago 11 comments

bitwize 3 days ago | parent

Fantastic to see the DOS Lisp scene revived again. Back in the day there was PC-Scheme from Texas Instruments, which I believe was R3RS-compliant.

shakna 2 days ago | parent

Gambit-C has also been around since '88 and can compile to fairly portable C.

Probably been a decade since I tried compiling it for DOS, but I believe getting it up and running shouldn't be difficult.

alexshendi 2 days ago | parent

Gambit-C 3.0 binaries are available at: https://gambitscheme.org/3.0/gc30-dj.zip (for DOS/DJGPP)

The other versions from https://gambitscheme.org/3.0/ are Windows or MacOS Classic binaries.

Needs a 386+ CPU, though.

NetMageSCW 2 days ago | parent

What I remember from back in the day was XLISP.

bitwize 2 days ago | parent

That's going way back, and was portable enough to be used on a variety of operating systems. There was a package of it for the HP Integral!

An early version of Xlisp was used as the basis for Autolisp, but Autolisp wasn't updated to track Xlisp's capabilities. It's kinda like how Commodore BASIC was a nerfed version of Microsoft BASIC that Commodore licensed back in the 1970s and then never updated since to track later BASIC versions, just added a few commands here and there to support later Commodore machines.

cestith 28 minutes ago | parent

It was a little disappointing to me given there were TurboAssembler, Turbo C, Turbo Pascal, Turbo Basic, and Turbo Prolog and that Borland had a trademark for Turbo Lisp that I don't think I ever saw an available version of that.

pmcgoron 2 days ago | parent

Aw, no call-with-current-continuation?

Jblx2 2 days ago | parent

How much does that really get used?

pmcgoron 2 days ago | parent

As an escape continuation, more than you'd expect. (Exception handlers, early return.) Full continuations are rarer, but I use them for doing error recovery.

dharmatech 2 days ago | parent

Super cool to see a new Scheme on DOS.

I've been messing around with a language that I summarize as:

ALOE = Scheme + Smalltalk + Types

Boids implementation:

https://github.com/dharmatech/2026-09-02-aloe-racket/blob/ma...

https://github.com/dharmatech/2026-09-02-aloe-racket

reddit_clone 33 minutes ago | parent

DOS? Like in MSDOS?

There is something I haven't heard in a long while. Turbo C was the shit back in the day. Until MS came in and pushed Borland out of the way.