Earlier this week, I stumbled across McCarthy's original paper describing LISP, and I felt a motivation to write my own LISP interpreter. I know there are plenty of good ones out there already, but this isn't really about making one that is better or different from the others. Mostly, I am interested in exploring my own understanding of what LISP programs really mean and, as a part of that, testing my ability as a C programmer to implement a LISP interpreter. I've talked with a friend that I will be collaborating with on this project, and we hope to get a basic interpreter up and running over the weekend.

We don't have a definitive feature list, although we do plan on supporting everything in the original paper, as well as basic garbage collection and an external function interface to define symbols that provide additional functionality to the LISP environment. This is primarily an investigation into what we're able to do, and, as a part of that, how hard it is to write a functional LISP interpreter, so we're not planning on too many language features; the focus is mostly on things that are necessary to run the engine itself. If we wanted the kind of functionality found in PLT Scheme/Racket, then we'd just use that to run our programs, but we don't want to stop with something that can't be used to do anything useful, either.

We've thrown around the idea of making a stand-alone compiler as well, but for now we're simply going to focus on implementing a REPL and on executing LISP scripts as an interpreter. I know that technically this counts as compilation (in some sense, based on the semantics of the paper), but we've also considered making a standalone compiler that will take a script and produce a binary that does not need to re-parse the script every time it is executed.

If you want to follow our progress, we've created a public github repository: https://github.com/gmalysa/cs-lisp where you can see all of the code.