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Comment by lolive | Hacker News Reader

Is there a kind of walkthrough/tutorial about how to develop a little Lisp interpreter? That sounds like a fun experiment.

PS: Sorry, I am a Java OO developper. But I like to learn :)

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Yes, this quite good book, "Lisp in Small Pieces"

https://www.amazon.com/Lisp-Small-Pieces-Christian-Queinnec/...

For example: http://www.buildyourownlisp.com/

But there's plenty more.

Another one https://github.com/kanaka/mal (quite famous AFAIK)

What I did was follow Paul Graham's Roots of Lisp[1]. He lays out in simple terms the basic operations, all I did was copy his examples into unit tests and then write code until the tests passed. I didn't even bother writing a parser, I just used JS expressions like this:

    	[natives.label, factorial, 
		[natives.lambda, [n], [natives.cond,
			[ [natives.eq, n, 0], 1 ],
			[ true, [natives.times, n, [factorial, [natives.plus, n, -1]]] ]
		]]
	]

It took me about 5 hours to get the whole think working from his paper, and I learned a lot in the process.

There's this classic by Peter Norvig (of AI a Modern Approach fame) about wrting a Lisp in Python...which also happens to have an amazing title :D

http://norvig.com/lispy.html

Edit: He also links to his Scheme interpreter in Java in that article: http://norvig.com/jscheme.html

>Is there a kind of walkthrough/tutorial about how to develop a little Lisp interpreter?

At least as many as there are TODO app examples for web frameworks...

https://danthedev.com/2015/09/09/lisp-in-your-language

A Lisp implemented through JavaScript arrays.

I've made a Lisp that compiles to Ramda.js, the source code is simple, http://github.com/yosbelms/ramdascript

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