Fun with Python and Lisp

Once you fight your way through all of the junk (photo’s, xkcd comics, etc.) on reddit, you’ll occasionally find some pretty interesting and enlightening things. A few days ago I saw this link to a Scheme interpreter in Python. I’ve always been interested in the Lisp family of languages, and this is one of them implemented in python. What a cool learning experience. After looking at that for a while I tried googling for some other examples and found this really awesome Lisp in Python implementation. Every so often I’ll think to myself “Wow, how hard can it be to make a language?” Then I’ll remember that it can be pretty damn hard (actually I remember my Programming Languages Concepts class, then I get the shakes thinking about all of the edge cases and other complications that you have to keep track of). Seeing something like these links is really educational for me, I get to see how two similar languages have been implemented (and thanks to the comments on programming.reddit.com) and how they could have been done differently.