I've been the in Small Pieces book, and it has helped me put names to a lot of concepts that I knew about Lisps and programming language design/implementation in general. It also provides a great historical perspective to , especially by mentioning all approaches that were tried but abandoned.

But other than being very very verbose, I find it hard to understand because it keeps changing the model of the every chapter. It starts with using Alists to model environments, then uses objects in the next chapter for the same, and in the next one, switches to using closures.

I get that it does this to showcase all possible ways of modelling an interpreter in Lisp, but it is quite disorienting to me as a reader.

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