Nano-Blog : August 3, 2025

Nano-Blog for the week of August 3, 2025.

§ August 4, 2025

Another Small Lisp

Nary a month goes by that we do not come across another small Lisp online. And why not? Like FORTH, Lisp is a simple language to implement and many developers code their own as a way of learning the details of the language.

We previously covered two small Lisps: April 24, 2025 : A Very Small Lisp in 99 Lines of C and May 20, 2025 : On the Subject of Pico-Lisp. The Lisp we are reporting on today looks similar to van Engelen's small lisp in C, but is its own creation. If you're interested in implementing your own Lisp (and who isn't these days?) examining several previous implementations is probably not wasted effort.

The implementation we're reporting on here, Micro-Lisp is currently hosted on @sepisoad's github account, but retains A. Carl Douglas' copyright notice. I suspect this is because it's no longer available on @carld's corner of github. But the Wayback Machine archived a copy of a decent description of what's going on with the code at https://web.archive.org/web/20230922184900/https://carld.github.io/2017/06/20/lisp-in-less-than-200-lines-of-c.html

Worth a read if you're hip to writing your own small Lisp.

#lisp #programming