readme.org

• iota Iota is a lisp interpreter. It is very much a work in progress.

build: #+begin_src sh make #+end_src

run: #+begin_src sh ./iota #+end_src

** What it has

• Interpretation.
• Lisp-1 namespacing.
• Lexical binding.
• Common Lisp-style macros.
• Self-evaluating keywords.
• Some arg parsing.
• Some introspection.
• Decent I/O.

** What it doesn't have

• Booleans (nil serves as false)
• Garbage collection.

** What I want it to have

• Self-hosted compilation, maybe to some kind of iota bytecode, maybe to javascript, maybe to C, maybe to all three.
• Much more introspection.
• Better arg parsing.
• More (fast) fundamental data structures, like maps/hashtables/dictionaries and resizable vectors.
• Garbage collection.

** Acknowledgements Big chunks of iota were built based on Peter Michaux's [[http://michaux.ca/articles/scheme-from-scratch-introduction][Scheme from Scratch]] series, which walks through a C implementation of the metacircular scheme intepreter in [[http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/][SICP]]. Other stuff was built by reading [[http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/][SICP]] directly. I am also working through Lisp in Small Pieces, so that will probably show up. Still other stuff I just hacked out. Some of it is broken, see below.

** Inspiration

• [[https://code.google.com/p/femtolisp/][femtolisp]]
• [[http://piumarta.com/software/maru/][maru]]

** Broken / TODO

• +Quasiquote (backquote) doesn't nest right+ backquote should work now
• Variable capture seems to be happening a lot, +maybe because quasiquote is broken, or+ maybe just inherent to common lisp macros in a lisp-1.