(2019) Lets LISP like its 1959 : Kristoffer Gronlund

One of my favorite papers in computer science is the original LISP paper by John McCarthy. Written in 1959, it describes something mind-bending: The interpreter for a language in the language that it interprets. If you understand this paper, you understand how computation works. Source: https://archive.org/details/lca2019-Lets_LISP_like_its_1959 A few years ago, I decided to implement the interpreter described in the paper, and this project turned out to be surprisingly popular. In this presentation, I'll show how to implement the original LISP interpreter in C, and together we will marvel at its elegance.