letLISP: A Pure LISP interpreter with dynamic-scope named-let

This project is aimed to define and implement a minimum LISP interpreter for beginners to learn LISP programming or implement small LISP interpreters in various programming languages.

Language Specification

letLISP has Scheme-like reserved words but just several Pure-oriented LISP syntax and built-in functions, including dynamic-scope named-let. Source codes are mostly running in Scheme implementations too, although the named-let must be supposed in dynamic-scope variable binding system.

• S-expressions are accepted with parenthesis enclosing and space separating, NOT dot notation for cdr of conscells because of implementation in some languages by using recursive array structures.
• Special forms
  • named-let with dynamic scope and Lisp-1.
  • if as conditional operator. The false-clause must be provided.
  • quote same as single-quotations.
• Built-in functions for list and integer processing
  • cons, car, cdr, pair? and eq? for lists and/or atoms
  • +, -, *, quotient and remainder for integers
  • < and = for integers, Boolean values are NOT supported though
  • read and write for S-expressions

Sample codes

letLISP has no global environment so dynamic-scope named-let is only the method to define recursion or loop. See samples directory for more sample codes.

$ python3 letLISP.py 
S> (let loop ((a '(x y z)) (b '(h i j)))
     (if (eq? a '()) b
         (cons (car a) (loop (cdr a) b))))
(x y z h i j)
S> (exit)
$ cat samples/fib-read.scm 
(write
  (let loop ((n (read)) (a 0) (b 1))
    (if (eq? n 0) (cons a '())
        (cons a
              (loop (- n 1)
                    b (+ a b))))))
$ python3 letLISP.py samples/fib-read.scm 
21
(0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144 233 377 610 987 1597 2584 4181 6765 10946)

Implementations

• letLISP.py: A reference-oriented implementation written in pseudocode-style Python 3 with basic syntax only, without list comprehensions nor lambda expressions.
• letLISP.c: A simple implementation with just one u_int16_t or u_int32_t array as memory for conscells and symbols, without GC nor storage area of integers.
• letLISP.html(letLISP.js): An implementation in JavaScript with HTML forms to input LISP code and read code.

License

(C) 2021 TAKIZAWA Yozo

The codes in this repository are licensed under CC0, Creative Commons Zero v1.0 Universal