Re:Contents • Build Your Own Lisp
by iainctduncan on Saturday April 29, 2023 @09:57AM
(#35752894)
It's still in print. Or at least, the last print run has not run out!
Re:Contents • Build Your Own Lisp
by seabass-labrax on Saturday April 29, 2023 @11:12AM
(#35753654)
Wow, it's... very expensive. Is there an ebook which doesn't cost more than a bookshelf full of paperbacks? It sounds like an excellent book, and, as you mention, the sort of thing which is timeless.
It's excellent. Get it at the library before buying.
Re:Contents • Build Your Own Lisp
by 64operator on Saturday April 29, 2023 @04:33PM
(#35756874)
Cheaper than some stupid generic college textbook though.
Re:Contents • Build Your Own Lisp
by mtlmtlmtlmtl on Saturday April 29, 2023 @02:12PM
(#35755511)
This looks like an excellent way of doing a deep dive that I'm tempted to do myself, now. It looks like a fascinating historical exposition of what is indeed one of the oldest languages in our field.
But for someone who just wants the most dead simple Lisp implementation possible, there's always SICP, which ends in them writing out a basic metacircular lisp intepreter on just a few blackboards, in Scheme.
Of course they skip parsing and boring details, as well as macros. But it's a good place to start.
It starts with a very minimal meta-evaluator for something similar to McCarthy's original Lisp, and then explains why all the changes from Lisp 1.0 since were made. Why did language designers change things in the first place? And then it shows you how those differences are implemented. One of the first lessons is the problems with the semantics of dynamic scoping, and the implementation of dynamic vs. lexical environments. I personally worked through the book writing in SML. Despite the name and approach, it's not really a Lisp book; it's a compiler implementation book.