The original metacircular evaluator
Page 13 of the Lisp 1.5 Programmer's Manual, showing the 'evalquote' function written as an m-expr. Basically, you're looking at all of Lisp defined in terms of itself.
Commentskhunyee_fung says:Our professor gave us this definition and
three weeks to implement a Lisp interpreter
in C (on a Dec10; that shows my age, eh?). My
group, Tim and I, slept about 3 hours every
day for that three weeks. The apply function
is the tough one; eval is easy.
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raganwald
says:
Yes, that was the big revelation to me when I was in graduate school—when I finally understood that the half page of code on the bottom of page 13 of the Lisp 1.5 manual was Lisp in itself. These were “Maxwell’s Equations of Software!” This is the whole world of programming in a few lines that I can put my hand over.
Alan Kay
Posted 41 months ago. ( permalink )