[abrax3141]

Re: Why do you need the old code if you implement your own interpreter anyway?

Several reasons. First, we don't need it, we want it -- it's a nice-to-have not a need-to-have.

It's nice to have for many reasons, none of them huge, but together they vie towards having it if we can find it:

1. What we're after is running the old AIs, not having IPL-V. We don't intend to write any new IPL code. The old AIs just happen to be written in IPL.

2. We can run the code without having to reformat it. There are numerous annoying nuances when recreating a very old language, not the least of which is the importance of card columns, which is annoying to "wrap parens around".

3. If we bother to write an emulator anyway, we can test our emulator against the real thing.

4. IPL-V being Lisp's conceptual machine code (one version of it, anyway), it should be easy to do so, so there's that as an engineering experiment.

5. Writing anything in Lisp is fun so it's an excuse to take a break from ... well, from pretty much anything else on my agenda, most of which do not require Lisp programming (although I often manage to squeeze some in anyway. :-)

[abrax3141]

BTW, Re: #2: There was a proposal for a Lisp-Like IPL that used s-expressions as list representations (actually, they call it "linear"): https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/AD0611841.pdf

[Rochus]

Interesting. Having the old compiler and an emulator is certainly helpful, but of course also yet another complexity. From my experience, it's very useful to have some decently large programs in the target language, the output of which are known. Thanks for the document, I will talke a look at it.