Hacker News Reader

But the first thing I want to about C is not a compiler written in C. That's an unfriendly intro to almost any language.

I want to see a procedure call, "Hello world" I/O, some math or string manipulation, and how to run that myself.

After that I can look at compiler sources.

View on HN

LISP is a notable exception. Btw, I do believe a compiler should be one of the examples of a new language.

FWIW, concatinative languages are even simpler than Lisp.

Are you saying that lisps are an exception to needing to see some small examples at first when looking at a new language? Why do you think they're an exception?

In LISP-like languages a compiler/interpeter is a simple example.

https://github.com/sbcl/sbcl/tree/master/src/compiler

Doesn't look simple to me.

This one is in one file, but more than half a megabyte of code spanning close to 12000 lines:

https://github.com/clisp-lang/clisp/blob/master/src/compiler...

The Emacs Lisp byte compiler also doesn't look like a good small example for neophytes:

http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/tree/lisp/emacs-l...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com