A Lisp in 99LOC

[eqvinox]

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

[omoikane]

It does not, because there is a syntax error on line 81 (extra close parenthesis):

https://github.com/Robert-van-Engelen/tinylisp/blob/2d0fb35b...

[f1shy]

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.

[OhMeadhbh]

Yeah. It's munged to fit in 99 lines.

[messe]

Surpringly readable though, despite all that, if you've ever implanted a language in similar constraints.

[OhMeadhbh]

Previously:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32100035

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32095655

and

* https://BI6.US/CO/N/20250420.HTML#/042402

[lisper]

Lisp in ~100 lines of Python:

https://flownet.com/ron/l.py

[f1shy]

Or from the venerable: https://norvig.com/lispy.html

[ginko]

Can’t you just “import lisp”?

[nivertech]

A better starting point:

https://github.com/Robert-van-Engelen/tinylisp/blob/main/tin...

[jhbadger]

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...

[forgotpwd16]

>C code in this project is strongly Lisp-like in compact form

Kinda reminds me J-flavored Whitney's one-page J interpreter.

[mark_l_watson]

The commented longer program listing was fun to read.

[coderatlarge]

can it execute the y-combinator?

[f1shy]

I’m pretty sure does not handle TCO… so probably not, unless with a huge stack.

[spyrja]

It doesn't appear to, but you could always add this to the included common.lisp file:

  (define Y (lambda (f) (lambda args ((f (Y f)) . args))))