Sunday, October 22, 2006

Lisp Interpreter in JavaScript

After checking out this JavaScript file, and another similar approaches, I found out that this is not exactly what I was looking for. Here's what I have in mind, for a virtual machine on the client-side:

  • I need it to run code specifically designed to it. (Right now, anything must do, but I need it to be able to translate it to valid client actions - aka, use something like JavaScript, DOM, CSS, etc, etc.
  • I need it to be modified from the server (i.e., to upload code changes)
  • I need to have some sort of support for a set of language constructs and basic types, including continuations. So I probably need to serialize everything.
  • I need to consider the drawbacks of maintaining all of the variables in the continuation's environment. One simple closure may be small, but the full environment - needed to make good use of dynamic variables - can become quite large. Note that some tests are in order to make this assert valid!


The downside of the Lisp Interpreter I checked is that everything is automatically translated to a Javascript object. That's not what I need, since I need the code to be able to travel back into the server. I only need it to be evaluated on JavaScript. (This also means I can use a portion of this code, like the tokenizer and/or parser!)



More to come...



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