Lisp Flavored Erlang (LFE) is a functional, concurrent, garbage collected, general-purpose programming language and Lisp dialect built on Core Erlang and the Erlang virtual machine (BEAM). LFE builds on Erlang to provide a Lisp syntax for writing distributed, fault-tolerant, soft real-time, non-stop applications. LFE also extends Erlang to support metaprogramming with Lisp macros and an improved developer experience with a feature-rich read–eval–print loop (REPL). LFE is actively supported on all recent releases of Erlang; the oldest version of Erlang supported is R14.
History
Initial release Initial work on LFE began in 2007, when Robert Virding started creating a prototype of Lisp running on Erlang. This work was focused primarily on parsing and exploring what an implementation might look like. No version control system was being used at the time, so tracking exact initial dates is somewhat problematic. Virding announced the first release of LFE on the Erlang Questions mail list in March 2008. This release of LFE was very limited: it did not handle recursive letrecs, binarys, receive, or try; it also did not support a Lisp shell. Initial development of LFE was done with version R12B-0 of Erlang on a Dell XPS laptop.
Motives Robert Virding has stated that there were several reasons why he started the LFE programming language:
He had prior experience programming in Lisp. Given his prior experience, he was interested in implementing his own Lisp. In particular, he wanted to implement a Lisp in Erlang: not only was he curious to see how it would run on and integrate with Erlang, he wanted to see what it would look like. Since helping to create the Erlang programming language, he had had the goal of making a Lisp which was specifically designed to run on the BEAM and able to fully interact with Erlang/OTP. He wanted to experiment with compiling another language on Erlang. As such, he saw LFE as a means to explore this by generating Core Erlang and plugging it into the backend of the Erlang compiler.
Features A language targeting Erlang virtual machine (BEAM) Seamless Erlang integration: zero-penalty Erlang function calls (and vice versa) Metaprogramming via Lisp macros and the homoiconicity of a Lisp Common Lisp-style documentation via both source code comments and docstrings Shared-nothing architecture concurrent programming via message passing (Actor model) Emphasis on recursion and higher-order functions instead of side-effect-based looping A full read–eval–print loop (REPL) for interactive development and testing (unlike Erlang's shell, the LFE REPL supports function and macro definitions) Pattern matching Hot loading of code A Lisp-2 separation of namespaces for variables and functions Java inter-operation via JInterface and Erjang Scripting abilities with both lfe and lfescript
Syntax and semantics
Symbolic expressions (S-expressions) Like Lisp, LFE is an expression-oriented language. Unlike non-homoiconic programming languages, Lisps make no or little syntactic distinction between expressions and statements: all code and data are written as expressions. LFE brought homoiconicity to the Erlang VM.
Lists In LFE, the list data type is written with its elements separated by whitespace, and surrounded by parentheses. For example, (list 1 2 'foo) is a list whose elements are the integers 1 and 2, and the atom [[foo|foo]]. These values are implicitly typed: they are respectively two integers and a Lisp-specific data type called a symbolic atom, and need not be declared as such. As seen in the example above, LFE expressions are written as lists, using prefix notation. The first element in the list is the name of a form, i.e., a function, operator, or macro. The remainder of the list are the arguments.
Operators The LFE-Erlang operators are used in the same way. The expression
evaluates to 42. Unlike functions in Erlang and LFE, arithmetic operators in Lisp are variadic (or n-ary), able to take any number of arguments.
Lambda expressions and function definition LFE has lambda, just like Common Lisp. It also, however, has lambda-match to account for Erlang's pattern-matching abilities in anonymous function calls.
Erlang idioms in LFE This section does not represent a complete comparison between Erlang and LFE, but should give a taste.
Pattern matching Erlang:
LFE:
List comprehensions Erlang:
LFE:
Or idiomatic functional style:
Guards Erlang:
LFE:
cons'ing in function heads Erlang:
LFE:
or using a ``cons`` literal instead of the constructor form:
Matching records in function heads Erlang:
LFE:
Receiving messages Erlang:
LFE:
or:
Examples
Erlang interoperability Calls to Erlang functions take the form (<module>:<function> <arg1> ... <argn>):
Functional paradigm Using recursion to define the Ackermann function:
Composing functions:
Concurrency Message-passing with Erlang's light-weight "processes":
Multiple simultaneous HTTP requests:
References
External links Official website LFE on GitHub LFE Quick Start LFE User Guide LFE on Rosetta Code
