tslisp is an implementation of LISP that's able to bootstrap John McCarthy's meta-circular evaluator in Typescripts type system. The implementation for the metacircular evaluator is the same as the one used by sectorlisp.
The code for the interpreter lives in lisp.ts. The code for the metacircular evaluator lives in metacircular.ts. You can see the result of evaluation by hovering over the Result type.
During development you might find it convenient to run pnpm test to ensure the project type checks. You might also want to make this change to prevent VSCode truncating type annotations: https://stackoverflow.com/a/67746753.
Required constructs:
- CONS: Takes two arguments, a value and a list, and returns a new list where the first argument is the first element (the head) and the second argument is the rest of the list (the tail).
- CAR: Takes a list as an argument and returns the first element (the head) of that list.
- CDR: Takes a list as an argument and returns the rest of the list (the tail), excluding the first element.
- QUOTE: Prevents evaluation of its argument, returning the argument as-is. It's often used to represent literal symbols or lists.
- ATOM: Takes a single argument and returns T if the argument is an atom (i.e., not a list), otherwise returns NIL.
- EQ: Tests if two atoms are the same (i.e., identical symbols or pointers), returning T for true or NIL for false.
- LAMBDA: Defines an anonymous function. Takes a list of parameters and a body, returning a function object that can be applied.
- COND: A conditional construct. Takes a series of test-expression pairs and evaluates the expression corresponding to the first true test.
Derived constructs:
- APPLY: Applies a function to a list of arguments. Takes two arguments: a function and a list of arguments, and returns the result of the function applied to those arguments.
- EVLIS: Evaluates each element of a list of expressions in sequence, returning a list of their results.
- PAIRLIS: Takes two lists (keys and values) and an existing association list, and constructs a new association list where each key is paired with the corresponding value.
- EVCON: Evaluates the conditions in a COND statement until it finds a true one, then evaluates and returns the corresponding expression.
- ASSOC: Takes a key and a list of key value pairs and returns the value associated with that key
https://github.com/jart/sectorlisp
LISP 1.5 Programmer's Manual, McCarthy et al.
Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part I, McCarthy et al.
The Roots of Lisp, Paul Graham