Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!cornell!rochester!udel!princeton!njin!aramis.rutgers.edu!paul.rutgers.edu!jac From: jac@paul.rutgers.edu (J. A. Chandross) Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Subject: Information on Lisp Interpreters/Compilers Message-ID: Date: 17 Feb 89 02:20:14 GMT References: <105@innovus.UUCP> Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J. Lines: 30 I am interested in writing a Lisp interpreter. This is mostly for the educational experience, but I do have an application which would benefit from a fairly stripped down version of Lisp. Most of the textbooks and papers I consulted did not describe anything beyond the traditional Lisp-in-Lisp. The few references I was able to find on constructing Lisp systems were primarily pages and pages of uncommented PDP-1 or Univac 1108 assembly code. These were less than totally thrilling. Since I want lexical scoping (although I don't necessarily need Scheme) a byte-code compiler/interpreter combination seems to be the best way to go. (This way I can just treat all local variable references as stack offsets since I know the offsets at compile time. All I have to do to call a function is to push the arguments on the stack and do a function call.) I would greatly appreciate references to papers which describe how an byte- coded interpreter and simple compiler are organized. Even better would be a Lisp written in a high-level language (other than Lisp for obvious reasons). I know this stuff exists, I just don't know where to look for it. I've check out numerous programming language survey books, the source for Berkeley Franz, Gnu Emacs' mock-Lisp, X-Lisp etc, but I haven't found a good reference to an implementation guide yet. Surely there are tech reports from the late sixties or early seventies which deal with this sort of thing? Jonathan A. Chandross Internet: jac@paul.rutgers.edu Uucp: rutgers!jac@paul.rutgers.edu