Lisp in QBASIC | Hacker News Reader

Lisp in QBASIC

ma.utexas.edu

97 pointsdeanmen28 comments

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To paraphrase Jurassic Park: "lisp finds a way"

That's nuthin: here's lisp in Fortran:

https://github.com/blakemcbride/LISPF4

I feel dirty for having read such blasphemy.

Blasphemy it is.

However, McCarthy and his team actually tried to use Fortran as the implementation language for the first LISP compiler, but Fortran was not in the mood to cooperate. Before C, nothing could beat Assembler, I guess...

Specifically, the original Fortran source:

https://github.com/blakemcbride/LISPF4/blob/master/Lispf42.f

f2c translation:

https://github.com/blakemcbride/LISPF4/blob/master/lispf42.c

Two more esoteric Lisp interpreters:

Lisp in BrainFuck:

http://code.google.com/p/zozotez/

Lisp in Befunge:

https://github.com/shinh/beflisp

While we are all posting these types of things, here is a Scheme I did in Prolog: https://github.com/FigBug/scheme

Might as well add my Lisp in PHP: https://github.com/cninja/pEigthP

I seem to recall more than a few Lisp interpreters in BASIC.

I'm almost certain that BYTE or Dr. Dobbs had one. I'm also pretty sure that one of the TRS-80 rags had one. I can't seem to find them now, however.

Sadly, I'm like everybody else nowadays. If it isn't on Google, it doesn't exist.

A classic, Lisp in TRS-80 Basic:

http://mypage.iu.edu/~rdbeer/Software/BasicLisp/BasicLisp1.p...

Lisp in Atari Basic:

http://www.cs.rit.edu/~anh/lisp_soft.html

Byte September 1981 did have a nontrivial program in Lisp: it parsed, differentiated, and simplified algebraic expressions. (I remember it fondly as my first Byte issue and first exposure to Lisp and calculus, the latter two almost equally mysterious. But going back and rereading the code, it was amateurish.)

I don't remember any Lisp in Basic in either Byte or DDJ, and I'd have probably seen it.

Finding a language that doesn't have a Lisp and writing a Lisp for it is probably the most predictable way to get on Hacker News. What's left?

Writing QBasic in LISP?

Prolog, another old AI language. Digitalk Smalltalk used to come with Prolog written in Smalltalk.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prolog

FigBug scratched that itch above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8077748.

Is there such a small, native Lisp in Perl?

https://github.com/darius/awklisp includes a Perl port contributed by someone who wished to remain anonymous.

Haskell implemented in PHP?

Heh, this would be torturous. I translated Peter Norvig's python lisp interpreter to PHP as a little get-me-started, the end result was not pleasant.

I was going to suggest one for the Sigma 5/7/9 if there was only an emulator. Then I found this http://www.andrews.edu/~calkins/sigma/sigma7.htm

> What's left?

LISP in BAYSICK? https://github.com/fogus/baysick

"Why does this exist? I wanted to write an interpreter and was stuck on a Windows XP laptop without Internet"

We have all had one of those days... :)

I was thinking about this. Also everytime I have been forced to find a solution without using the internet I have been thrilled about what I learned. Too bad I never make that happen more often... :(

I started programming in the 7th grade with QBASIC. This made me nostalgic. Thanks for sharing. Nice seeing WEND after a long time.

Yes :) QuickBasic enabled you to build your EXEs. Biggest IDE upgrade I have seen for a long time!

QBasic was my first experience with programming too.

I haven't inspected it in detail, but it goes to show again how little you need to implement something LISP-y. My first LISP was built in C, which feels almost banal in comparison (it was longer, too).

Come on, someone do Lisp in Piet.

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