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Comment by retrac

It moves fast at the start so maybe not for the complete beginner, but I can really recommend "Lisp in Small Pieces" by Christian Queinnec: https://www.amazon.ca/Lisp-Small-Pieces-Christian-Queinnec/d... It's a bit old now (early 90s) but Lisp is timeless :) I think it's out of print now. It goes through the implementation of both interpreters and compilers for Lisp, in Lisp.

It starts with a very minimal meta-evaluator for something similar to McCarthy's original Lisp, and then explains why all the changes from Lisp 1.0 since were made. Why did language designers change things in the first place? And then it shows you how those differences are implemented. One of the first lessons is the problems with the semantics of dynamic scoping, and the implementation of dynamic vs. lexical environments. I personally worked through the book writing in SML. Despite the name and approach, it's not really a Lisp book; it's a compiler implementation book.

parent retrac 3 years ago

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