erlisp

A braindead LISP implementation in badly-written Erlang

Languages & Compilers

Explore on GitHub Read Hacker News discussions

2Distinct people

4Mentions

1Explicit recommenders

10GitHub stars

REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

A braindead LISP implementation in badly-written Erlang

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

A few years ago I wrote a minimal lisp in erlang using pg's paper. I called it erlisp[1]. I did it in order to learn Erlang while reading the original Seven Languages in Seven…

breckinloggins used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year4 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2013-07-23 17:12:12 UTC to 2021-02-17 06:30:40 UTC.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges

UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Comments
2013	2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
2014	2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2015	2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2	2
2016	2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2017	2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2018	2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2019	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2020	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2021	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1

What Hacker News says

4 sources

breckinloggins·Feb 17, 2021

I was obsessed with this for a little while several years ago and ended up making my own version based on the same paper: https://github.com/breckinloggins/vau/blob/master/README.md It was my second try at a lisp, the first being erlisp (https://github.com/breckinloggins/erlisp). Neither of these projects really went anywhere, but they really scratched an itch I had and I learned so much about programming language implementation while working on them. If you haven't tried yet I highly recommend writing a little lisp of your own. It doesn't need to take over the world to be a meaningful project in your life.

In The Kernel Programming Language (2010)

rubiquity·Jan 25, 2015

> [1] (yes, it's a pun) https://github.com/breckinloggins/erlisp It's also a portmanteau!

In Lisp Flavored Erlang

breckinloggins·Jan 25, 2015Recommendation phrase

A few years ago I wrote a minimal lisp in erlang using pg's paper. I called it erlisp[1]. I did it in order to learn Erlang while reading the original Seven Languages in Seven Weeks book. If you want to learn the basics of a language, I highly recommend writing a lisp in it using only the Roots of Lisp paper and the target language's reference guide. It's a fun challenge. [1] (yes, it's a pun) https://github.com/breckinloggins/erlisp

In Lisp Flavored Erlang

breckinloggins·Jul 23, 2013

I wrote one in erlang that works pretty well and is even designed to be able to call into erlang functions (if I took it that far). https://github.com/breckinloggins/erlisp I'm currently working on writing one in Haskell using the Scheme48 tutorial [1], though I'd eventually like to replace the evaluator with an F-Algebra[2] so I can learn about that. https://github.com/breckinloggins/scheme48 As a side note, would any Haskellers be willing to look at the abstraction I did for parsing #-forms? I created an adhoc data structure: hashLiteralInfo = [ ('f', (Nothing, \_ -> Bool False)), ('t', (Nothing, \_ -> Bool True)), ('b', (Just $ many $ oneOf "01", Number . toInteger . fromBase 2)), ('o', (Just $ many $ oneOf "01234567", Number . toInteger . fromBase 8)), ('d', (Just $ many $ oneOf "0123456789

Read the rest

", Number . toInteger . fromBase 10)), ('h', (Just $ many $ oneOf "0123456789abcdefABCDEF", Number . toInteger . fromBase 16)) ] And then the parser consumes that: parseHashLiteral :: Parser LispVal parseHashLiteral = do char '#' c <- oneOf $ map fst hashLiteralInfo let literalInfo = lookup c hashLiteralInfo case literalInfo of Nothing -> fail "Internal parse error: unregistered literal info" Just (Nothing, f) -> return $ f "unneeded" -- I know there's a more idiomatic way to do that Just (Just literalParser, f) -> do digits <- literalParser return $ f digits This works and is "abstracted", but doesn't feel idiomatic. Thoughts? [1] http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Write_Yourself_a_Scheme_in_48_H... [2] http://bartoszmilewski.com/2013/06/10/understanding-f-algebr...

In Little Lisp interpreter