mal - Make a Lisp

Description

Mal is an interpreter for a subset of the Clojure programming language. Mal is implemented from scratch in 12 different languages:

Bash shell
C
C#
Clojure
Java
Javascript
GNU Make
mal itself
PHP
Postscript
Python
Ruby

Mal is also a learning tool. Each implentation of mal is separated into 11 incremental, self-contained (and testable) steps that demonstrate core concepts of Lisp. The last step is capable of self-hosting (running the mal implemenation of mal).

The mal (make a lisp) steps are:

step0_repl
step1_read_print
step2_eval
step3_env
step4_if_fn_do
step5_tco
step6_file
step7_quote
step8_macros
step9_interop
stepA_more

Mal was presented publicly for the first time in a lightning talk at Clojure West 2014 (unfortunately there is no video). See mal/clojurewest2014.mal for the presentation that was given at the conference (yes the presentation is a mal program).

Building/running implementations

Bash 4

cd bash
bash stepX_YYY.sh

C

The C implementation of mal requires the following libraries: glib, libffi6 and either the libedit or GNU readline library.

cd c
make
./stepX_YYY

C#

The C# implementation of mal has been tested on Linux using the Mono C# compiler (mcs) and the Mono runtime (version 2.10.8.1). Both are required to build and run the C# implementation.

cd cs
make
mono ./stepX_YYY

Clojure

cd clojure
lein with-profile +stepX trampoline run

Java 1.7

cd java
mvn compile
mvn -quiet exec:java -Dexec.mainClass=mal.stepX_YYY
    # OR
mvn -quiet exec:java -Dexec.mainClass=mal.stepX_YYY -Dexec.args="CMDLINE_ARGS"

Javascript/Node

cd js
npm update
node stepX_YYY.js

Mal

Running the mal implementation of mal involves running stepA of one of the other implementations and passing the mal step to run as a command line argument.

cd IMPL
IMPL_STEPA_CMD ../mal/stepX_YYY.mal

GNU Make 3.81

cd make
make -f stepX_YYY.mk

PHP 5.3

cd php
php stepX_YYY.php

Postscript Level 2/3

cd ps
gs -q -dNODISPLAY stepX_YYY.ps

Python (2 or 3)

cd python
python stepX_YYY.py

Ruby (1.8)

cd ruby
ruby stepX_YYY.rb

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