On: Why Racket? Why Lisp? (2014)

[gjgggk3]

There is nothing difficult about writing an s-expression parser. None of the plethora of Scheme interpreters out there get parsing wrong. Handling dotted pairs is rather trivial compared to, say, getting hygienic macros right. Or implementing call/cc. Quasiquote handling is not even that difficult.

[bsder → gjgggk3]

> There is nothing difficult about writing an s-expression parser.

Really? Try it in C.

The Scheme interpreters do very limited dotted-pair parsing until they bootstrap into scheme. There is a good reason for this.

And this is before we even start dealing with things like circular references.