5 comments
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.
Gambit-C has also been around since '88 and can compile to fairly portable C.<p>Probably been a decade since I tried compiling it for DOS, but I believe getting it up and running shouldn't be difficult.
Gambit-C 3.0 binaries are available at:
<a href="https://gambitscheme.org/3.0/gc30-dj.zip" rel="nofollow">https://gambitscheme.org/3.0/gc30-dj.zip</a>
(for DOS/DJGPP)<p>The other versions from <a href="https://gambitscheme.org/3.0/" rel="nofollow">https://gambitscheme.org/3.0/</a> are Windows or MacOS Classic binaries.<p>Needs a 386+ CPU, though.
What I remember from back in the day was XLISP.
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!<p>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.
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.
Super cool to see a new Scheme on DOS.<p>I've been messing around with a language that I summarize as:<p>ALOE = Scheme + Smalltalk + Types<p>Boids implementation:<p><a href="https://github.com/dharmatech/2026-09-02-aloe-racket/blob/main/examples/boids.aloe" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/dharmatech/2026-09-02-aloe-racket/blob/ma...</a><p><a href="https://github.com/dharmatech/2026-09-02-aloe-racket" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/dharmatech/2026-09-02-aloe-racket</a>
DOS? Like in MSDOS?<p>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.
Aw, no call-with-current-continuation?
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