Stever's blog

lisp

September 25, 2009 at 1:53 pm | Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

Been playing around more with lisp lately, it’s very interesting. Yesterday I wrote a primitive interpreter in about 200 lines of lisp code. An interpreter, by the way, is a program that “interprets” (or executes) the code you write in BASIC or Python or whatever. Every time you write a BASIC program, an interpreter reads it and executes the code line by line.

The interesting thing is that unlike BASIC, I didn’t have an interpreter to execute my interpreter. So I used the interpreter I wrote to interpret itself! This actually works. Conceptually, this is what I did yesterday: