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; Functional
(map [1 2 3] (lambda! (x) (+ x 1)))

; Meta-programming
(set (#meta :locals) "myvar" 42)
(+ myvar 1)

About

I really like the idea of lisps, but unlike other functional languages, I’ve never built anything with them. So instead of building something with a lisp, I decided to build a lisp. Specifically, I wanted an embedded lisp, because I like the idea of using a lisp as a scripting language for future game development projects, and because there’s only a couple of embeddable options out there. I also thought it might be interesting to try to expose interpreter state via meta-programming facilities similar to Lua.

The rest of the story is pretty standard: there’s not much complexity to the parser, and the tree-walking interpreter is straightforward. Thanks to the interpreter state being exposed by the meta-programming facilities, the interpreter doesn’t actually implement any primitives of its own – instead, core modules like def-macro! are loaded at runtime, which theoretically allows for entirely different front-ends and semantics.

While basic functionality is implemented, many standard library modules are missing which would make the language actually useful. Rather than spending my time implementing this, I’ve actually been using Fennel for my Lua-flavoured lisp needs.

Like all my other experiments, I’ll probably come back to this at some point.