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Comment by marijn | Hacker News Reader

He seems to have forgotten lambda, without which you can't really write anything more interesting than the examples that are given.

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I thought this was his example of lambda:

  l.eval [:label, :second, [:quote, [:lambda, [:x], [:car, [:cdr, :x]]]]]

No?

Can someone explain how this works?

I understand that (label second '(...)) makes second evaluate to that in the future, statefully, but, the lambda symbol doesn't even appear to have a definition; furthermore, if you try to use it in a way that would work with a real lambda, it doesn't work.

For instance [[:lambda, [:x], :x], 2]

Take a look at the second line in the `apply` definition[1]:

    self.eval @env[fn][2], Hash[*(@env[fn][1].zip args).flatten(1)]

It's triggered when the `fn` is not callable, i.e. when we pass in lambda:

    [:lambda, [:x], [:car, [:cdr, :x]]]

The code ignores the `:lambda` symbol (that would be `@env[fn][0]`).

It evals the third element of the list (the lambda body) in a new context that combines `@env` and the binding of lambda's args to the symbols in the lambda's definition -- that's what the `Hash` mumbo jumbo creates.

[1]: https://github.com/fogus/ulithp/blob/b02d5806ce3b2d3766311c2...

Even the example using lambda?

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