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Lisp - Almost a whole Truth!
, 1989
"... Lisp is well known for its metacircular definitions. They differ by their intent (what they want to prove), their means (what linguistic features are allowed for the definition) and by their scope (what linguistic features are described). This paper provides a new metacircular definition for a compl ..."
Abstract
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Lisp is well known for its metacircular definitions. They differ by their intent (what they want to prove), their means (what linguistic features are allowed for the definition) and by their scope (what linguistic features are described). This paper provides a new metacircular definition for a complete Lisp system including traditionally neglected features such as cons, read, print and error. The programming style adopted for this interpreter is inspired both by denotational semantics and its continuation passing style (to explain continuation handling) and by the object oriented paradigm as highlighted by typedriven generic functions. The resulting interpreter lessens the number of primitives it uses to only eight: car, cdr, rplaca, rplacd, eq, read-char, write-char and end, while still providing Scheme-like essential capabilities (less arithmetic). The overall size is near 500 lines of fully encapsulated code that, if efficiency is not the main requirement, can be easily turned into...

