The Art of The Interpreter

An interactive exploration of Steele and Sussman's classic paper
“The Art of The Interpreter”

Introduction

The paper approaches the problem of constructing modular systems from the eyes of a language designer. In order to conduct their analysis, the authors introduce an initial interpreter for a restricted LISP dialect – which is then progressively extended in an effort to better support modularity.

As part of the presentation, we will implement from the ground up the interpreter and its extensions. At each step, we will assess our current ability to construct modular systems by testing our running implementation against the examples in the paper.

Running the presentation

To start the presentation on a Mac:

./patat art-of-the-interpreter.md

Please refer to the Requirements section for more details.

Requirements

The presentation should work on every system where the presentation tool Patat is available. A working installation of Deno is required to run the examples in the slides. Images are encoded in Sixel and shown using ImageMagick. A list of terminal emulators supporting Sixel is available here.

Note that an installation of Rosetta 2 may be needed for Macs with M chips.

License

This work is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.

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