Re:How to Write a Lisp Interpreter in Python (2010)
by rm445 on Monday October 24, 2016 @05:01PM
(#12782858)
I think there's a separate Lisp lineage anyway, wherein someone in the 1960s wrote a minimal machine-code interpreter, and ever since lispers have been writing interpreters on top of other Lisps and revising them to emit compiled code along the way. We would still have Lisp compilers if C never existed.
I've become interested in Lisp every couple of years. This fall I even learned Clojure and implemented a Lisp interpreter in Python. I searched a lot for any open-source Lisp implementation in assembly, but found none. Here it is!
I thought a lot about bootstrapping, too, since apparently almost every compiler is written in C these days. Somewhere I got the idea that in the 1970s someone wrote a compiler in assembly and that was used to bootstrap the first C compiler. Guess I'm a romantic, but for me it's important that we know how to get where we are now. Having a high-level language implemented in assembly is quite essential to that, IMO.