Norvig's lispy: beautiful and illuminating Python code

Room:

Wicklow Hall 1

Start (Dublin time):

13:45 on 12 July 2022

Start (your time):

12:45 on 12 July 2022

Duration:

180 minutes

Abstract

Why isn't if a function? Why does Python need to add keywords from time to time? What precisely is a closure, what problem does it solve, and how does it work? These are some of the fundamental questions you'll be able to answer after this tutorial: an interactive exploration of Peter Norvig's lis.py–an interpreter for a subset of the Scheme dialect of Lisp in 132 lines of Python.

TutorialPython Friends

Description

Peter Norvig of Stanford University wrote lis.py: an interpreter for a subset of the Scheme dialect of Lisp in 132 lines of readable Python. I took Norvig's code, updated it to modern Python coding style, and integrated it into a Jupyter notebook that provides explanations as well as interactive experiments and exercises checked automatically.

Why should you study lis.py? This is what I got out of it:

• Learning how an interpreter works gave me a deeper understanding of Python and programming languages in general—interpreted or compiled.

• The simplicity of Scheme is a master class of language design.

• lis.py is a beautiful example of idiomatic Python code.

The speaker