How Lisp Became God's Own Programming Language

Re:How Lisp Became God's Own Programming Language by RodgerTheGreat on Tuesday October 16, 2018 @08:03AM (#18228628)

When I read SICP, I worked through the exercises in Forth. I had to implement my own garbage collector, create dialect extensions for nice list notation, build a thunk-based mechanism for closure... with the right groundwork laid, Forth can keep up pretty well. I was always somewhat dissatisfied that cute metacircular lisp interpreters leave as tautologies so many important details of their own mechanics.

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Re:How Lisp Became God's Own Programming Language by yvdriess on Tuesday October 16, 2018 @10:55AM (#18229871)

It functions as a good way to whet the appetite of the reader or student. SICP's meta-circular implementation occupies a kind of sweet spot, it imparts to students that only just grokked recursion to understand how the programming language itself is just a program they can understand and tinker with. The state machine implementation of the Scheme interpreter sort of breaks the meta-circularity to dismantle the tautologies.

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Re:How Lisp Became God's Own Programming Language by 3rdAccount on Tuesday October 16, 2018 @01:14PM (#18231145)

How did you learn how to write your own Forth? Brodie shows how to just think in and use one already written right?

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Re:How Lisp Became God's Own Programming Language by Tomte on Tuesday October 16, 2018 @01:45PM (#18231455)

Jones Forth is an extremely readable tutorial how to write a Forth.

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Re:How Lisp Became God's Own Programming Language by 3rdAccount on Tuesday October 16, 2018 @06:30PM (#18233866)

I've gone through it before, but it has been ages. Maybe I'll check again...thanks.

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