Re: What is the smallest self-hosting language?

Alan Lehotsky <qsmgmt@earthlink.net> wrote in message news:03-01-159...
> In the mid 70's, I wrote the first compiler (well it was actually an
> interpreter) hosted on a VAX-11 (which at that time was one of the
> ONLY two in the world - DEC's first two prototypes.)
>
> The compiler was for a language called something like Tiny-Lisp or
> Mock-Lisp, and was about 400 lines of Bliss-32 code. One of the
> programs that I ran was a Tiny-Lisp interpreter (it was really only a
> dozen or so lines of code - Tiny-Lisp only had a handful of
> primitives. It was much more primitive than the Tiny Lisp described
> in http://www.cis.rit.edu/~jerry/Software/lithp/README .


A tiny language, but I think he was referring to a language compiler
written in its own language. Like the Small-C compiler written in C,
basically a one pass stack machine. Your Tiny_Lisp interpreter sounds
like it fits the bill, but I guess a definition of 'smallest' is
needed. Smallest in the number of required functions to implement the
language?


> The language was so simple that arithmetic was done by counting, so
> the number 3 was represented by a list with three items and to add two
> numbers together you CDR-ed down the list for each operand and CONS-ed
> each CAR onto a new list representing the result. Multiplication was
> EXTREMELY slow. There is apparently a variant Lisp called Stutter
> that is much closer to the VAX Tiny-Lisp, the sample code at
> http://xarch.tu-graz.ac.at/autocad/lisp/float.slp looks a little like
> what I had to do to represent arithmetic.


I'm not versed in Lisp, although I've picked up a couple of books on
it for the PC, just to look at the language. All of those dodge what
CDR and CAR might've stood for, although they explain their
functionality. Were those acronym names for something more
descriptive?? You sound like an authority who would know.


Thanks
["Contents of Decrement Register" and "Contents of Address Register",
those being two 15-bit fields in a 36-bit word on an IBM 7090 in which
an address could conveniently be stored. Ref: McCarthy et al, Lisp
1.5 Programmer's Manual, MIT Press, 1965]

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