Hello World in PicoLisp

Published on (Updated: 02 May 2020)

Welcome to the Hello World in Picolisp page! Here, you'll find the source code for this program as well as a description of how the program works.

Current Solution

(prinl "Hello, World!")
(bye)

Hello World in Picolisp was written by:

If you see anything you'd like to change or update, please consider contributing.

Note: The solution shown above is the current solution in the Sample Programs repository as of May 15 2023 09:32:26. The solution was first committed on May 08 2018 10:27:41. As a result, documentation below may be outdated.

How to Implement the Solution

Let's break down what's happening. Since PicoLisp is a dialect of Lisp, we can expect a ton of parentheses. In fact, our solution requires a single set of parentheses at a minimum.

Inside the parentheses, we have a function call. In this case, the print function is named prinl, and the input is our "Hello, World!" string. When executed, our string will print to the console. The bye function is required to exit the program.

How to Run the Solution

If we want to run the solution, we can try an online editor. However, I ran into some problems with this particular editor.

Alternatively, if we have access to a Unix, Linux, or Mac machine, we can easily download and install the latest version of PicoLisp. That said, @cess11 has a great video proving that this solution works:

asciicast

And, that's it! If implemented correctly, the solution should print "Hello, World!" to the console.