Re:Roll A Lisp In C – Reading (2020)
by mtreis86 on Sunday May 12, 2024 @09:31AM
(#40334306)
Many are based on the SICP metacircular evaluator. Write that in your language of choice then you can bootstrap into scheme from there. Also see the 1986 MIT lecture videos by the authors, to get the spirit of the thing.
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Re:Roll A Lisp In C – Reading (2020)
by mikelevins on Sunday May 12, 2024 @11:23AM
(#40335191)
The first time I attempted a Lisp back in about 1989 or something, I used the metacircular evaluator from SICP.
A little later I used Norvig's Scheme implementation from chapters 22 and 23 of PAIP (https://norvig.github.io/paip-lisp/#/?id=paradigms-of-artifi...).
I liked Norvig's a little better. It starts with a simple interpreter and adds improvements step-by-step, winding up with an optimizing compiler that targets a bytecode VM.
That approach makes a lot of implementation details manifest in a way that is easy to grasp. For example, I think I understood continuations much better after seeing Norvig's account of how to implement them.