mpc

Many thanks! It took me a long time to come up with the interface. I've been wanting a good parser combinator library for C since 2023 when I contributed to mpc[1]: [1]: https://github.com/orangeduck/mpc/commits?author=steve-chave...

This is MUCH more than a 'Build Your Own Lisp'. To the point of almost being anything but. This is an amazing resource for getting started with learning C by making your own "programming language", independent of any Lisp conventions. For me, the most 'lispy' aspect of 'making your own lisp' is prebaked by the author with their using their own prebuilt parser library 'mpc'. (I was unable to find a link to the source in the book, so https://github.com/orangeduck/mpc ) I was unable to find any instance of 'car' or 'cdr' or 'caddar' and their like, which I feel is the real 'build your own lisp' epiphany. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAR_and_CDR The parser is so widely, and wildly, useful that it is independent of notation style, for instance, lisp's nearly ubiquitous 'polish notation'. (or its variants, for instance, 'cambridge polish nota

I worked through the book while I was in school as a way to prepare myself for a C-programming heavy course (OS) that I was scheduled to take later in the semester. I liked the book - its quite intense but you do end up learning quite a bit. I also picked up interesting tidbits on Lisp so that's quite welcoming. One thing that you might be interested in knowing about is that this book uses a few libraries which means you don't end up writing everything from scratch. For example, in the chapter on parsing, the grammar is implemented using a library called MPC (https://github.com/orangeduck/mpc) written by the author himself. I didn't quite reach till the very end so didn't have a chance to implement Macros (the author does mention them in Chapter 16), so if that's something you can very keen on implementing then you might have to look some

The funniest part is that the C in K&R is not really much different, let alone better, than in any of the books they recommend against. I guarantee K&R would be on their list of books to avoid if it wasn't written by… well, K&R. I've used & contributed to Daniel's stuff (mostly mpc¹) and his code is (IMO) quite high quality. ##c is a bit deluded. ¹ https://github.com/orangeduck/mpc

For parsing, there's the excellent mpc, a parser combinator library in highly portable C. https://github.com/orangeduck/mpc I even managed to use it drop in for a RiscOS project once.

A simple ES3 interpreter is pretty easy, particularly if you just go for 'the good parts' (plus basic global objects). I can highly recommend mpc[1] if you do, it's a really amazing library for parser combinators in C. I was never much of a fan of yacc/lex (perhaps out of my ignorance of BNF). With yacc/lex I always felt like I had to have my grammar all planned out (which if you implement JS I suppose isn't a problem) before I could start developing and it was very hard to work incrementally. mpc is very flexible and since it's just a C library I find it a lot easier to iterate with. 1: https://github.com/orangeduck/mpc

For that I think you can do something similar to what mpc for C (https://github.com/orangeduck/mpc) and LPeg for Lua (http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/lpeg/), which is to provide the parsing machinery and write a small DSL with the same machinery for the users.

Actually the project depends on the library which claims to implement the named rule: https://github.com/orangeduck/mpc