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Lecture 7A: Metacircular Evaluator, Part 1

MIT OpenCourseWare · lecture · Watch on YouTube

Compilers, interpreters & program analysisFunctional programmingUniversity lectures & courses

What it is

Lecture 7A from MIT 6.001 (SICP) by Abelson and Sussman introduces the metacircular evaluator, a Scheme interpreter written in Scheme. It shows how evaluating a program is itself a program.

Why Hacker News recommends it

HN holds the SICP lectures up as joyful classics, and this lecture as the moment the evaluator is revealed.

  • 1 people recommended it
  • 1 different months
  • 1 strong recommendations
  • first 2020, last 2023

What HN commenters said

  1. “But mostly it just makes me happy - it's infectious and weird.”

    SICP lecture revealing the metacircular evaluator, joyful to rewatch

    mrspeaker, 2020-06 · Strong recommendation · in “MIT 6.001 Structure and Interpretation (1986) [video]”

Excerpts from Hacker News comments, linked to the originals. Summaries and labels were written by a language model from those comments.

Topics: sicp, scheme, interpreters, mit 6.001, lisp

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