Serval – Simple Scheme interpreter in Python

I’ve been always fascinated by and interested in interpreters, compilers, and language design. But there is a huge gap between being interested and actually knowing how to implement one whether it’s a simple interpreter, compiler or a programming language.

So couple weeks ago I decided to reduce the gap I had and start with a simple high-level interpreter for a subset of Scheme. Thus after several weekend evenings of code tweaking Serval was born.

Serval is a high-level Scheme interpreter written in Python. It implements a subset of R5RS. The code closely follows Scheme meta-circular evaluator implementation from Ch.4 of the SICP book.

The goals of the project are pretty simple:

1. Self-education (For me there is no better way of gaining and retaining information than by (re)implementing something on my own)
2. To serve as a potential example for other people interested in interpreter implementation, particularly Scheme interpreter.
3. Not a goal per se, but I wanted  Serval to be able to run all examples from “The Little Schemer” book (that was my test target). The project has a test module test_the_little_schemer.py which runs simple meta-circular evaluator from Ch.10 of the book. Yeah, now I can evaluate Scheme code using Scheme evaluator that is interpreted by Scheme interpreter written in Python

To whet your appetite here are some examples of Serval REPL:

1. Defining simple function
   
serval> (define add1 (lambda (x) (+ x 1)))
ok
serval> (add1 9)
10

2. Loading representation from a file
   
serval> (load "/home/alienoid/scheme/the_little_schemer/ch10.ss")
serval> (value '((lambda (x) (cons x x)) 5))
(5 . 5)


To install the interpreter use either pip install

$ sudo pip install serval
$ serval
serval> 

or clone Git repo and run buildout:

$ git clone git://github.com/rspivak/serval.git
$ cd serval/
$ python bootstrap.py 
$ bin/buildout 
$ bin/serval
serval> 

Resources that I found useful when working on Serval:

1. SICP
2. The Little Schemer
3. The Scheme Programming Language
4. Language Implementation Patterns
5. Scheme from Scratch
6. Bob Scheme