From: K.S.Sreeram
Subject: understanding lisp internals
Date: 
Message-ID: <1155833233.636318.251090@75g2000cwc.googlegroups.com>
Hi All,

The various free lisp/scheme implementations are classified according
to properties like.. performance, features, libraries etc etc... But
can somebody tell me, which ones have simple and clean internals? I'm
asking because I want to use the code to understand more about how
lisps are implemented. I guess 'simple' implies 'less features', but
that doesn't matter.

Thanks in advance!
[sreeram;]
From: John Stoneham
Subject: Re: understanding lisp internals
Date: 
Message-ID: <1155838526.806010.113850@i3g2000cwc.googlegroups.com>
K.S.Sreeram wrote:
> asking because I want to use the code to understand more about how
> lisps are implemented.

Take a look at "Lisp in Small Pieces":
http://www-spi.lip6.fr/~queinnec/WWW/LiSP.html
From: funkyj
Subject: Re: understanding lisp internals
Date: 
Message-ID: <1155842898.805582.230640@b28g2000cwb.googlegroups.com>
K.S.Sreeram wrote:

> The various free lisp/scheme implementations are classified according
> to properties like.. performance, features, libraries etc etc... But
> can somebody tell me, which ones have simple and clean internals?

for small and simple it is hard to beat 'tiny scheme'

http://sourceforge.net/projects/tinyscheme

and

http://tinyscheme.sourceforge.net/home.html

    TS> As an embedded interpreter, it allows multiple
    TS> interpreter states to coexist in the same program,
    TS> without any interference between them. Programmatically,
    TS> foreign functions in C can be added and values can be
    TS> defined in the Scheme environment. Being a quite small
    TS> program, it is easy to comprehend, get to grips with, and
    TS> use.

    TS> The latest version has shrunk again. When you
    TS> conditionally exclude the more advanced features, the
    TS> object file in Linux Intel is smaller than 64k.
From: Ari Johnson
Subject: Re: understanding lisp internals
Date: 
Message-ID: <873bbvkznz.fsf@bender.theari.com>
"K.S.Sreeram" <·········@gmail.com> writes:

> Hi All,
> 
> The various free lisp/scheme implementations are classified according
> to properties like.. performance, features, libraries etc etc... But
> can somebody tell me, which ones have simple and clean internals? I'm
> asking because I want to use the code to understand more about how
> lisps are implemented. I guess 'simple' implies 'less features', but
> that doesn't matter.

Simple doesn't really imply fewer features, if the features are
cleanly laid out and separated.  I don't know enough about the
internals of various Common Lisp and Scheme implementations, although
I have dug into Guile and SBCL.  Guile was fairly quick to find my way
around in, and SBCL has a learning curve to understand the layout of
everything but once you get to that point it is fairly easy to
understand the actual code.

Depending on what you want to understand about their implementations,
you could go with either of those or even my own ALisp dialect for
comparison purposes of a naive, hobby-horsical Lisp versus a serious
one.
comp.lang.lisp / 2006 / aug