[doc] Including blog entry for Chapter 3

As a chronic blogger, I've been updating my journey on my website
at http://elfsternberg.com.  This is where the original markdown
files are kept.
This commit is contained in:
Elf M. Sternberg 2015-07-08 14:45:59 -07:00
parent 1a777acb4c
commit b9a60e3fed
2 changed files with 52 additions and 29 deletions

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.PHONY: test
# docs: $(patsubst %.md,%.html,$(wildcard *.md))
all: $(targets)
%.js: src/%.coffee
node_modules/.bin/mocha coffee -c -o . $<
%.html: %.md header.html footer.html
cat header.html > $@
pandoc $< >> $@
cat footer.html >> $@
node_modules: package.json
mkdir -p node_modules
npm install
test: clean node_modules
@JUNIT_REPORT_PATH=test-reports.xml JUNIT_REPORT_STACK=1 ./node_modules/.bin/mocha \
--reporter mocha-jenkins-reporter --compilers coffee:coffee-script/register || true
ltest: node_modules
@node_modules/.bin/mocha --compilers coffee:coffee-script/register
clean:
rm -f report.xml test-reports.xml

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I've been working my way through a Lisp textbook, *Lisp In Small
Pieces*, by Christian Quinnec. It was originally written in French and
is not that well known among English-speaking Lisperati, not in
comparison to the Wizard book or Paul Graham's *On Lisp*, but what
caught my attention was how it really was in *small* pieces. Each
chapter ended with an interpreter described, sometimes in code,
sometimes in text; if you were smart enough, you could actually piece
the whole thing together and see how it worked.
I decided to make things hard for myself. Since I'm *not* a Lisperati
(although I may well and truly be seduced by Hy), I decided to make
things hard for myself by writing the interpreter in Coffeescript. Most
Lisp books assume you have a Lisp handy, and Quinnec's examples are fine
and dandy on many variants of Scheme, but for a fun time I decided to
write it in something else. Raganwald claims Javascript "is a Lisp,"
and if that's so it ought to be good enough to write a Lisp in it.
I mean, it's obviously been done before. I tried once before but got
lost. *LiSP* does me the favor of keeping me on track.
You can see all my sourcecode at <a
href="https://github.com/elfsternberg/LispInSmallPieces">Github: Lisp In
Small Pieces</a>.
Chapter 1 contains the base interpreter. It also contains a
hand-written Lisp reader, and refers to another project I have on
GitHub, <a
href="https://github.com/elfsternberg/cons-lists">cons-lists</a>, which
is exactly what it sounds like, a singly-linked list implementation in
Javascript, using nested Javascript arrays as the base. The base
interpreter is very primitive-- you can't even create new variable names
in the global namespace! Although you can shadow them using lambdas, so
it's pretty much bog standard Lambda Calculus.
Chapter "Lambda 1" contains a continuation-passing variant of the
interpreter from Chapter 1. It's basically a facile reading of
Lisperator's λ-language intepreter, with my own parser front-end and
some CPS style. It passes all the tests, but it's a distraction.
Chapter 3 contains the same interpreter, only using the architecture
Quinnec describes in Chapter 3 of his book.
Chapter 2 describes a number of different methodologies for binding,
scoping, and namespaces. The material is interesting but I didn't
pursue writing the various interpreters. I "got" what Quinnec was
saying, and if I'm ever interested in writing something with scoping
rules outside of the lexical scopes with which I'm familiar, I might
revisit the material.
The next step will be to add functions to the Chapter 3 interpreter to
do the various continuation management games, like call/cc, throw/catch,
and so forth. Because *those*, I feel I need to understand.