Zork Zcode Interpreters Appear Out Of Nowhere

Some of our readers may know about Zork (and 1, 2, 3), the 1977 text adventure originally written for the PDP-10. The game has been public domain for a while now, but recently, the interpreters for…

Lisp Runs This Microcontroller Pendant

As a programming language, Lisp has been around longer than any other active language except for Fortran. To anyone who regularly uses it, it’s easy to see why: the language allows for new sy…

Reinterpreting The Lua Interpreter

The idea behind Lua is a beautiful one. A simple and concise syntax offers almost all of the niceties of a first-class language. Moreover, a naive implementation of an interpreter with a giant swit…

Two Esoteric Programming Languages, One Interpreter

Many of you will have heard of the esoteric programming language Brainf**k_. It’s an example language that’s nearly impossible to use because it’s too simple. It’s basically a Turing computer in co…

Interpreters In Scala

You might think of interpreters as only good for writing programs. Many people learned programming on some kind of interpreter — like BASIC — because you get immediate feedback and don&…