Subject: Re: The secret of hand compiling LISP/Scheme
From: rpw3@rpw3.org (Rob Warnock)
Date: Mon, 08 Oct 2007 21:32:27 -0500
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp,comp.lang.scheme
Message-ID: <v_KdnZXEKOimdZfanZ2dnUVZ_vamnZ2d@speakeasy.net>
Paul Rubin  <http://phr.cx@NOSPAM.invalid> wrote:
+---------------
| gnuist006@hotmail.com writes:
| > Anyway, there is not a single book, or a document that walks you
| > through the process of writing a meta-circular definition and then
| > hand compiling it. I might say, it is still a secret known to a few.
| 
| http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp
+---------------

Or Steele and Sussman's earlier "Lambda Papers":

    http://library.readscheme.org/page1.html

especially:

    http://repository.readscheme.org/ftp/papers/ai-lab-pubs/AIM-453.pdf
    "The Art of the Interpreter
     or, the Modularity Complex (Parts Zero, One, and Two)"
    Guy Lewis Steele, Jr. and Gerald Jay Sussman
    Abstract:
    We examine the effects of various language design decisions on
    the programming styles available to a user of the language, with
    particular emphasis on the ability to incrementally construct
    modular systems. At each step we exhibit an interactive meta-circular
    interpreter for the language under consideration. Each new interpreter
    is the result of an incremental change to a previous interpreter.
    ...
    A subset of these interpreters constitute a partial historical
    reconstruction of the actual evaluation of LISP.


-Rob

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