Bootstrapping Lisp in a Boot Sector

sectorlisp sectorlisp is a 512-byte implementation of LISP that's able to bootstrap John McCarthy's meta-circular evaluator on bare metal. Overview LISP has been described as the Maxwell's equations of software. Yet there's been very little focus to date on reducing these equations to their simplest possible form. Even the original LISP paper from the 1960's defines LISP with nonessential elements, e.g. LABEL . This project aims to solve that by doing three things: We provide a LISP implementation that's written in LISP, as a single pure expression, using only the essential functions of the language. See lisp.lisp. It's the same meta-circular evaluator in John McCarthy's paper from the 1960's, except with its bugs fixed, dependencies included, and syntactic sugar removed. We provide a readable portable C reference implementation to show how the meta-circular evaluator can be natively bootstrapped on POSIX conforming platforms, with a pleasant readline-like interface. See lisp.c. W ... Read full article.