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It that case it'd be really cool if you implemented John McCarthy's metacircular evaluator in Mu LISP syntax to demonstrate it's a LISP. Sort of like how when John McCarthy shared the idea for LISP one of the first things he had to do was show that it's able to do the same things as a Turing machine.



No upvote needed :) but sure I'll post it here.

(I haven't done this so far because I find metacircularity to not be very interesting. It was interesting when JMC proved it could be done. Mu's whole reason for existence is linear rather than circular bootstrapping. We can disagree over whether I get to call it a Lisp or not, but if it has the full power of macros I'm happy.)


And Justine, if you want to join our ever continuing argument about bootstrapping processes and trust in programming language toolchains, Kartik is the right person to talk to :p




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