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> They defined a language in terms of itself. Reminds me of the plethora of compilers written in the languages they're meant to compile. (Roslyn, Java compiler
by rcbdev 3y ago
> They defined a language in terms of itself.
Reminds me of the plethora of compilers written in the languages they're meant to compile. (Roslyn, Java compiler, F# compiler, etc.)
- dreamcompiler 3y agoBut of course it's not the same thing. The spec for a language is harder to define than the compiler for it. The spec for Lisp is written in Lisp. And it's about half a page of Lisp code. And it's executable, which is not usually true with specs. This is why reading the Lisp spec feels like reading "the Maxwell's equations of software" (to quote Alan Kay). It's a whole other fundamental model of computation, every bit as fundamental as a Turing machine, but much more practical. Nobody builds serious computing engines out of pure Turing machines, but people do it all the time with McCarthy machines.