38 lines
1.5 KiB
Markdown
38 lines
1.5 KiB
Markdown
# A Collection of Interpreters from Lisp In Small Pieces, written in Coffeescript
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## Purpose
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I don't know Lisp, so I figured the correct place to start was to write
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my own interpreter. After buying five different textbooks (*The
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Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs*, aka "The Wizard
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Book", Friedman's *The Essentials of Programming Languages*, *Let over
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Lambda*, *On Lisp*, and one more) I decided Christian Quinnec's *Lisp In
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Small Pieces* gave the clearest step-by-step introduction.
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Since I didn't know Lisp, my task was to translate what Quiennec wrote
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in his book into a language I *did* know: Javascript. Well,
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Coffeescript, which is basically Javascript with a lot of the
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syntactical noise removed, which is why I liked it.
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## Usage
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I don't know if you're going to get much out of it, but the reader
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(which I had to write by hand, seeing as I didn't *have* a native Lisp
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reader on hand in my Javascripty environment), and each interpreter has
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a fairly standard test case that demonstrates that each language does
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what it says it does: you can do math, set variables, name and create
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functions, and even do recursion.
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## Notes
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chapter-lambda-1 is not from Lisp In Small Pieces. It is a primitive
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CPS interpreter built on top of the interpreter from LiSP Chapter 1,
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using techniques derived from a fairly facile reading of
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<a href="http://lisperator.net/pltut/">Lisperator's "Implement A
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Programming Language in Javascript."</a> But it was fun.
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## LICENSE AND COPYRIGHT NOTICE: NO WARRANTY GRANTED OR IMPLIED
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See the LICENSE file.
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