tinylisp VS mal

LISP has a very simple and consistent syntax, so much so that a basic interpreter can be done in only 99 lines of C.

I needed a scripting language for an old-school Sierra On-Line adventure game engine I'm working on and was looking at learning writing simple compilers / interpreters, when I stumbled across tinylisp and realized it was exactly what I needed.

Tinylisp can be a good starting point. The writeup explains how it works and how to add more features.

I've been on a bit of a retro-coding binge lately, using SDL2 for screen, I/O, and audio. For one project I replicated an NES-style sprite engine and a phase-modulated synthesizer for audio, but right now I'm currently porting tinylisp over to C++ for use in an old-school Sierra-style adventure game engine as the scripting language.

Lately, we run Robert van Engelen's 1k Lisp on ESP32 and 8266 boards: https://github.com/Robert-van-Engelen/lisp but we started on his tiny Lisp: https://github.com/Robert-van-Engelen/tinylisp (which is 99 lines of C)

>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