On Jun 13, 4:07 pm, bolega <gnuist...@gmail.com> wrote: > I am trying to compare LISP/Scheme/Python for their expressiveness. > > For this, I propose a vanilla C interpreter. I have seen a book which > writes C interpreter in C. > > The criteria would be the small size and high readability of the code. > > Are there already answers anywhere ? > > How would a gury approach such a project ? > > Bolega
You should probably narrow down your project to one. For example, write a LISt Processor Meta Circular Evaluator in C. You can take Paul Graham's rendition as a start and forget about garbage collection. Start with getchar()/putchar() for I/O. Although C comes with a regex library, you probably do not need a regex or parser at all for this. This is the beauty of LISP which is why McCarthy was able to bypass the several man years of effort involved in FORmula TRANslator. Even as a young boy like L. Peter Deutsch was able to write it in assembly for one of the PDP's. You will have go implement an associative array or a symbol-value table probably as a stack or linked list. You will have to decide how you implement the trees, as cons cells or some other method. Dynamic scoping is easy to implement and that is what elisp has. I am not aware of any book that provides implementation of LISP in C and explains it at the same time. This is the extent of help I can provide, someone else can probably help you more. Anyone know what the first initial of L. Peter Deutsch stand for ? Rivka -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
