Bootstrappable language

[David Betz]

On Dec 10, 2008, at 11:58 PM, blstuart at bellsouth.net wrote:

> A lot of the space is in the big libraries of stuff, especially
> for common lisp.  XLISP is a good example of one that's
> more managable--and it's author is among us.  There are
> also some really tiny schemes that can be used to bootstrap.

If you're interested in a tiny Lisp that is easy to port, check out  
the Lispkit system described by Peter Henderson in his book  
"Functional Programming: Application and Implementation". I read that  
just before building the bytecode compiler that is in XScheme (later  
called XLISP 3.0). He gives a complete listing of the virtual machine  
code for the compiler in the back of the book. You have to do a little  
work because his instructions are represented as lists and you  
generally want to use just sequences of bytes but that isn't too hard  
and then you have a working Lisp system.