mal VS BuildYourOwnLisp

>Would be interesting to see how the interpreter works actually...

It's quite easy to see, there are interpeters for Lisp in like 20 lines or so.

Here's a good one:

https://norvig.com/lispy.html

(It has the full code in a link towards the bottom)

There's also this:

https://github.com/kanaka/mal

Here is one implementation of a lisp (mal specifically) in matlab: https://github.com/kanaka/mal/blob/dcf8f4d7b9cf7b858850a04a0...

Only 260 lines of code, pretty concise :)

have a look at the crafting interpreters book, plus make a lisp (lisp is a great first language to make a compiler/interpreter for, just google "lisp compiler/interpreter" and you'll find lots of resources)

If you're really okay with the limitations of a tree-walk interpreter, you might want to check out MAL, which will teach you how to write a tree-walk interpreter for a LISP. The code for MAL has been translated to most popular languages, so you can work through the creation of an interpreter in the language of your choice. JLox would give you a bit more detail and a more complex language, but I'm not convinced that it's all that important.

Write a small programming language (lisp (https://github.com/kanaka/mal) or brainfuck) in C++ to learn the syntax more. This will teach you a lot about programming languages in general.

So I started some hobbyist game dev using Unity and realised that the full process of making a game has dependencies on a mass of lower-level skills including lighting virtual environments. As a hobbyist photographer I could see some useful analogies from lighting studios and other scenes

So I pivoted, and eventually made money, not from selling a game, but from developing tutorials about digital lighting. I was also able to contribute to a project at work that was making a product based on commercial games engine, not by actually coding it, but by helping to better estimate the costs of the asset generation required.

Coding Unity object scripts in C# also got me back into programming, and I went on to successfully build a self-hosting lisp interpreter following the Make a Lisp guidelines [0].

[0] https://github.com/kanaka/mal/blob/master/process/guide.md

Hijacking the top comment to add https://buildyourownlisp.com and https://github.com/kanaka/mal

Build Your Own Lisp

Create your own meta-circular evaluator: https://www.buildyourownlisp.com/

I don't know about C++ but there is this incredible course on C by learning to build your own Lisp. https://www.buildyourownlisp.com/

I find the best way to learn technical topics is to build a simplified version of the thing. The trick is to understand the relationship between the high level components without getting lost in the details. This high level understanding then helps inform you when you drill down into specifics.

I think this book is a shining example of that philosophy: https://www.buildyourownlisp.com/. In the book, you implement an extremely bare-bones version of lisp, but it has been invaluable in my career. I found I was able to understand nuanced language features much more quickly because I have a clear model of how programming languages are decomposed into their components.

If you still want to produce a toy project in C I would suggest to build your own LISP ;-)

If you're after a lisp, MAL on Github (By kanaka) and https://www.buildyourownlisp.com/ are good.

Build your own Lisp is cool but offloads the language grammar and the parsing to the author's mpc library, this is already way overkill for what I'd like to do.

Writing a Lisp - https://www.buildyourownlisp.com/

Lisps are also a good language if you want to know how languages work. They are very easy to make an interpreter for. There are good tutorials for that at https://github.com/kanaka/mal and https://www.buildyourownlisp.com/.

Anyone have any input on:

https://www.buildyourownlisp.com/

It's been in my bookmarks for a long time but I've never really had time to really start it. The "who is this for" page say:

"This book is for anyone wanting to learn C, or who has once wondered how to build their own programming language.".

Well, I'm fairly competent in C (but not great) but would like to get a glimpse of what it's like to build my own language. Is it worth the time?