I had once started writing a Lisp interpreter in Python, only to realize that I was leveraging a lot of pythonic power (most notably at least for me at the time

I had once started writing a Lisp interpreter in Python, only to realize that I was leveraging a lot of pythonic power (most notably at least for me at the time - garbage collection) - i.e. more than I had planned to use. So then I switched to writing the same interpreter in C, and building my own memory manager. (As is usually the case --) turns out it's more complicated (for someone with little experience in writing these sorts of things) than one might expect. :) But it's very rewarding indeed. Of course I still think that there's much value in writing such an interpreter in Python. I would simply recommend for someone doing that to later on re-write it in some lower level language! Re: this, Norvig commented/said, > [...] we are relying on many features of Python: call stack, data types, garbage collection, etc. The next step would be to show a compiler to some sort of assembly language. I think either the Java JVM or the Python byte code would be good targets. We'd also need a runtime system with GC. I show the compiler in my PAIP book.