martes, 25 de enero de 2011

(cadr has)

I've been hacking on HAS a bit more, to push forward its functionality.
Mostly what's been achieved by now:


  • Perl side

    • (repl) primitive implemented. it acts as a debugger in some way,
      because it gives you the environment in the state of the moment
      when you executed it. I couldn't implement it in scheme itself
      because I have no eval available from scheme.

    • Read plain files. As I started implementing some functionality
      in scheme, A scheme file must be loaded at start. just enter the
      file name as a parameter. Last sexp should be (repl) to have
      your repl available.

    • Comments. ';' is the comment marker

    • = operator

    • nil. transformed to 0.

    • list. yeah. As HAScheme can't understand variable length
      arguments, I implemented it to make it more confortable to build
      lists. It's built on an ugly hack. More on that later.

  • Scheme side

    • cons, car, cdr. Implemented basic structures. Implemented as
      lambdas. as in SICP, somewhere in chapter 2 IIRC. Simple though
      impressive IMHO (and inefficient, but…)

    • print_list. conses down a list and prints each element in a
      line

I run it using builtins.scm as the first parameter, and then, repl is
yours, with lists and conses available for you.

Now the not-so-beautiful parts


If I want lists, I just have to nest conses, but who doesn't want a
litte luxury?.

To implement list, I've thought 3 possible solutions (haven't read

about how to implement them correctly, just brainstorming):


  • Variable actual arguments. If I could implement the dot (.) syntax
    for variable number of arguments, I could implement list as a
    simple scheme function. Problem is that I need lists to stash
    the resting parameters (hascheme lists, not Perl ), and I haven't thought how to bootstrap.

  • Write a new primitive (on the perl side) that builds the correct
    cons structures, on the perl side. Mind you, that list is VERY
    coupled to cons implementation. And quite fuzzy on the perl side
    too.

  • Substitute list for the appropiate number of conses (as a string),
    and let the already written parser do the job. That's the one I implemented.

Probably, I'll start from the scratch building another scheme interpreter, following BillHails book. Or at least, I'll go as far as my motivation and brain allow me.

That's all for now. Here's my other post about Hascheme, and the github repo.

Byez.

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