A Lisp/Clojure dialect implementation in JS.

Online Demo

This is a toy programming language implemented using functional javascript. An attemp to learn both both functional JS and Clojure. Implementing a turing complete language in so few lines of code was incredibly fun.

The following 2 files are important:

• src/parser.js Take a string written in Lisp and converts to JS data structure.

  • List enclosed in () are converted to JS arrays.
  • Vectors enclosed in [] are converted to JS arrays.
  • Strings are converted to JS strings.
  • Numbers are converted to JS numbers.
  • Boolean are convreted to JS boolean.
  • Regular expression are converted to JS RegExp.
  • Maps enclosed in {} are converted to JS Map, not Object.
  • Sets enclosed in #{} are converted to JS Set.
  • Short Lambdas #(...) are converted to JS arrays.
  • Everything else is an identifier.

• src/evaluator.js Takes JS data structure of a Lisp program and runs it. It supports lazy evaluation of function arguments, closure, lambda, destructuring and rest arguments, short lambda sytnax. And a handful of core clojure functions like +, -, *, /, =, mod, map, filter, reduce, println, range, count, int, nth and a few more. Check the examples/ folder for examples.

Running the examples

NodeJS 4+ is required. Then run the following commands

npm install
chmod a+x src/lipsy
src/lipsy examples/hello.clj

Inspired from SICP, implemented some cool stuff like lazy evaluation of function arguments and lazy def. Functions are first class with support for closure.