Holy cow this is —structurally, not just expression— some of the worst C code I have ever seen, with the abuse of the 'double' type, 'T' cast that looks like a declaration, endian dependency, and strict aliasing violations galore… does this even work on a modern compiler? o.O
Certainly not the worst I have seen, by far; but yes, not pretty. IMHO “Just for making it shorter“. I would very much prefer 200 lines of actually readable nice code.
Yes! Exactly what I meant. 700 lines, but of code that can be understood, and looks clearly as C. Also btw, the general file structure, the documentation, I prefer fe any day of the week. Thanks for pointing that out, I will take a look at it.
It's interesting that he seems to have written this for a pocket computer, because there actually was a pocket computer of similar vintage that had LISP built in -- 1989's Casio AI-1000
>C code in this project is strongly Lisp-like in compact form
Kinda reminds me J-flavored Whitney's one-page J interpreter.
Holy cow this is —structurally, not just expression— some of the worst C code I have ever seen, with the abuse of the 'double' type, 'T' cast that looks like a declaration, endian dependency, and strict aliasing violations galore… does this even work on a modern compiler? o.O
It does not, because there is a syntax error on line 81 (extra close parenthesis):
https://github.com/Robert-van-Engelen/tinylisp/blob/2d0fb35b...
Brought to you by this marvellous commit with the message "update",
https://github.com/Robert-van-Engelen/tinylisp/commit/40c6c0...
Certainly not the worst I have seen, by far; but yes, not pretty. IMHO “Just for making it shorter“. I would very much prefer 200 lines of actually readable nice code.
For reading, I enjoyed fe, which was very clear: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36239175
Yes! Exactly what I meant. 700 lines, but of code that can be understood, and looks clearly as C. Also btw, the general file structure, the documentation, I prefer fe any day of the week. Thanks for pointing that out, I will take a look at it.
Surpringly readable though, despite all that, if you've ever implanted a language in similar constraints.
Yeah. It's munged to fit in 99 lines.
That's besides my point, which is why I said "structure, not just expression".
It could've used a struct rather than wedging tags into a double's first byte and still be 99 lines.
That's a standard technique in interpreters. All non-toy Javascript engines use it, for example.
If that's the trick you object to then you will be sad to hear that Ruby uses it.
Lisp in ~100 lines of Python:
https://flownet.com/ron/l.py
Or from the venerable: https://norvig.com/lispy.html
Can’t you just “import lisp”?
It's interesting that he seems to have written this for a pocket computer, because there actually was a pocket computer of similar vintage that had LISP built in -- 1989's Casio AI-1000
https://pockemul.com/index.php/2020/04/27/pockemul-1-10-0-ne...
Previously:
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32100035
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32095655
and
* https://BI6.US/CO/N/20250420.HTML#/042402
A better starting point:
https://github.com/Robert-van-Engelen/tinylisp/blob/main/tin...
can it execute the y-combinator?
I’m pretty sure does not handle TCO… so probably not, unless with a huge stack.
It doesn't appear to, but you could always add this to the included common.lisp file: