faq lia

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why is Lia a thing? in the beginning the Universe was created. this had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.
ensued a chain of event leading to my existence, which itself ensued a chain of event leading to my awakening one fateful morning during which my entropy pool suddenly summoned the words "hey, what's lisp, again?"
due to my personal situation, i haven't had enough brainpower to learn lisp (which i am currently working on) , yet was (and am) obsessed by it; thus , due to my lack of learning capacity at the moment, i'd instead decided to make , in the only language i consider to have mastered, Lua, a Lisp-like ... Lua.
that's it. there's nothing else. eventually, i learnt about fennel and... what was/is Lia trying to achieve? good question. next question.
more seriously? originally it was just an experiment for me to learn.
i cobbled (it wasn't worthy of "hacked") together the first Lia interpreter (lazia, occasionally refered to as meLia h0) in very late december 2021.
it was disgusting, used a hacky gsub at its core and probably made me hesitate publishing meLia as an agpl-licensed program in fear of ridicule or infecting the future patient zero of a rage epidemic.
more on lazia below. but when i ran the first few lines of Lia code (and assumed myself free of lazia's dark voodoo magic constraints/inner workings), it kind of ported the
"hold on, doesn't that implies weird things?"
feeling you get when you begin understanding lisp, which i probably would have struggled getting the "standard way" because of aforementioned reasons.
what is Lia (like), then? okay, see fennel? i mentioned it earlier.
i'm trying to make Lia be to fennel what Scheme is to (common) lisp.
if you don't know what this means, essentially, i'm trying to make Lia into an usable language with a minimal environment variable (and a tiny source file). okay, but why should i use Lia over $language? you shouldn't!
...at least, probably not this early. sure, try it out (it even works in LuaJIT if you want to make your stuff quicker), and if you're good at Lua you'll probably learn Lia really quick, but using a language whose main and only interpreter still has '-indev' in the version name to program important stuff is a bad idea.
just try it, see if you can do some interesting stuff and if you get really obsessed over it, hit me up on the site's page or on revolt (dm me your username or something on neocities and i'll add you there).
you don't even know how to lisp/scheme and expect me to learn your lisp/scheme bootleg? i don't! you should read the the second and above questions.
how do i learn it? by clicking this.
alternatively, for undocumented/badly documented features you learn Lua (a little) then learn Lisp (a tiny bit), then use both respectively to read the envtable and think up programs.
found a bug! i am in awe of the effort you're putting into this thing. please tell me here or on revolt as mentioned above! i even have a patch! please pretend you can't see my tears of joy and post it along with your bug report above. i'll probably add you on a (good) list at some point.

please feel free to ask me anything on here or revolt! recent tests indicate that i don't bite.