i’m grateful to the author for making their work available online for free. i once did an exercise like this myself (just the code not the book) for fun and fo

i’m grateful to the author for making their work available online for free. i once did an exercise like this myself (just the code not the book) for fun and found it extremely gratifying even though the code does not survive and never made it into any of my other projects as i had hoped at the outset. mine got to be around 5 kloc with all the error handling but i wasn’t optimizing for keeping it short. i’m impressed by the many super brief ones that others with deeper understanding have built. the point of view that this is really about learning C might have been buttressed further by starting with an existing super brief personal lisp and reading through that in a structured way; something that i personally would still like to do and that i semi-resorted to when debugging my way through the eval of the y-combinator which was one of the moments that exposed my poor design choices and the flaws i wasn’t cognizant of when doing simple expression evaluation. building a proper test harness was also a big deal as i went which seems like a highly relevant bit to highlight in a journey like this. some references to existing high-quality short personal lisps and schemes might also be a welcome addition.