Re: Programming Languages on Apple II

[Sheldon Simms <sheldonsimms@yahoo.com>]

On Tue, 02 Mar 2004 04:53:49 +0000, Michael J. Mahon wrote:

> Chris Harrington wrote:
> 
> <extensive list snipped>
> 
>>WOOO!  That's a mountain right there.  Thanks everyone for the
>>contributions.  The FAQ about the different programming languages was
>>an especially neat read.  LISP on the Apple ][; never thought it could
>>exist!
> 
> Well, it's not the most capable Lisp in the world--since Lisp is so
> memory intensive.
> 
> But there was a little Applesoft implementation of eval() that was
> only a couple of pages of code.  Of course, it took forever to 
> evaluate even the simlest lambda expressions.

This reminds me of a project I once started but never finished.
A long time back, someone in this newsgroup proposed an Apple II
programming contest. The idea was similar to one-liner contests,
but in this case the programs were to be machine code and the
limit was 256 bytes.

I decided to try to implement a mini-lisp. Once it got to be
around 512 bytes, I stopped working on it, since it was clearly
too big for the contest.

The contest idea is pretty neat, but maybe making it 512 or 1024
bytes would be better.