Don't Build Your Own Lisp
The review critiques a book about building a Lisp interpreter in C, arguing that it is poorly structured and difficult to follow. The author highlights significant flaws in the book's approach to parsing and error handling, making it challenging for beginners. Overall, the review suggests that the book fails to effectively teach the concepts of Lisp programming.
- ▪The book is criticized for its poor implementation decisions and lack of clarity.
- ▪It suggests starting with an evaluator for a toy calculator language, which complicates learning.
- ▪The author argues that using a parser generator for Lisp is unnecessary and overly complex.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Don’t Build Your Own Lisp I feel somewhat pressed to give a negative review of this book. This comes from someone who has worked on various Lisp implementations, and written some amount of C, but that isn’t an excuse to be overly harsh. This book, however, does not provide many nice things to say, and plenty of un-nice things. My apologies in advance. First off: God help you if you are going to write your first interpreter in C of all things. No one I know thinks it’s a good idea to start inventing a programming language, which perhaps is one of the more ill-defined and bug-prone things you can do, with an implementation in C. So the premise is already a bad idea. Maybe you can work your way down if you so want, but it’s an awkward starting point.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Gist.
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