
Scheme from Scratch - Bootstrap v0.1 - Integers - mnemonik
http://peter.michaux.ca/articles/scheme-from-scratch-bootstrap-v0_1-integers
======
samstokes
Resonant for me:

"I remember a time when I thought only super-humans could implement an
interpreter but a naive interpreter like this one is really just a matter of
putting one foot in front of the next."

I too thought interpreters were arcane and mystical, until a year or so ago I
just tried writing one. Mine was also for Scheme, although I cheated because
my implementation language was Common Lisp (I was learning it and wanted a toy
project to work on). By the end of a plane flight from the UK to Australia I
had a minimal working Scheme, with functions, recursion, lexical scope and
closures.

I didn't go on to turn it into a bytecode interpreter or a compiler - I didn't
even get tail calls working right - but I'm confident that if I'd wanted to,
they would also have turned out not to be as hard as I previously thought. I
scratched the itch, and it was easy and fun.

I don't think this pattern is unique to programming, and there's probably a
lesson to learn. Something you want to do - but don't because you think it's
hard - probably isn't hard, so why not try it?

------
arithmetic
I'm no C programmer, but I love how clean the code is. Good work!

------
z8000
What is with the weird Music comment at th end of scheme.c?

