The evaluator is the core of the interpreter--it's what does all of the interesting work to evaluate complicated expressions.
Evaluation is done recursively. We write code to evaluate simple expressions, and use recursion to break down complicated expressions into simple parts.
I'll show a simple evaluator for simple arithmetic expressions, like a four-function calculator, which you can use like this, given the read-eval-print-loop above:
Scheme>(repl math-eval) ; start up read-eval-print loop w/arithmetic eval repl>1 1 repl>(+ 1 2) 3 repl>(* (+ 1 3) (- 4 2)) 8
As before, the read-eval-print-loop reads what you type at the
repl> prompt as an s-expression, and calls math-eval.
Here's the main dispatch routine of the interpreter, which figures
out what kind of expression it's given, and either evaluates it
trivially or calls math-eval-combo to help:
(define (math-eval expr)
(cond ;; self-evaluating object? (we only handle numbers)
((number? expr)
expr)
;; compound expression? (we only handle two-arg combinations)
((and (list? expr)
(eq? (length expr) 3))
(math-eval-combo expr))
(else
(error "invalid expression" expr))))
First math-eval checks the expression to see if it's something
simple that it can evaluate straightforwardly, without recursion.
The only simple expressions in our language are numeric literals,
so math-eval just uses the predicate number? to test
whether the expression is a number. If so, it just returns that value.
(Voila! We've implemented self-evaluating expressions.)
If the expression is not simple, it's supposed to be an arithmetic
expression with an operator and two operands, represented as a three
element list. (This is the subset of Scheme's combinations that
this interpreter can handle.) In this case, math-eval calls
math-eval-combo.
(define (math-eval-combo expr)
(let ((arg1 (math-eval (cadr expr)))
(arg2 (math-eval (caddr expr))))
(cond ((eq? (car expr) '+)
(+ arg1 arg2))
((eq? (car expr) '-)
(- arg1 arg2))
((eq? (car expr) '*)
(* arg1 arg2))
((eq? (car expr) '/)
(/ arg1 arg2))
(else
(error "Invalid operation in expr:" expr)))))
math-eval-combo handles a combination (math operation) by calling
math-eval recursively to evaluate the arguments,
checking which operator is used in the expression, and calling
the appropriate Scheme procedure to perform the actual operation.
Two concepts worth knowing about language implementation are snarfing and bootstrapping. Snarfing is "stealing" features from an underlying language when implementing a new language. Bootstrapping is the process of building a language implementation (or other system) by using the system to extend itself.
Our example interpreter implements Scheme in Scheme, but we could have written it in C or assembly language. If we had done that, we'd have to have written our own read-eval-print loop, and a bunch of not-very interesting code to read from the keyboard input and create data structures, display data structures on the screen, and so on. Instead, we "cheated" by snarfing those features from the underlying Scheme system--we simply took features from the underlying Scheme system and used them in the language we interpret. Our tiny language requires you to type in Scheme lists, because it uses the Scheme read-eval-print to get its input and call the interpreter. If we wanted to, we could provide our own reading routine that reads things in a different syntax. For example, we might read input that uses square brackets instead of parentheses for nesting, or which uses infix operators instead of prefix operators.
There are some features we didn't just snarf, though--we wrote our
own evaluation procedure which controls recursive evaluation. For
example, we use basic Scheme arithemetic procedures to implement
individual arithmetic operations, but we don't simply snarf them:
the interpreter recognizes arithmetic operations in its input language,
and maps them onto procedure calls in the underlying language. We
can change our language by changing those mappings: for example,
we could use the symbols sum, difference, product,
and quotient instead of +, -, *, and /.
Or we could use the same names, but implement the operations differently.
(For example, we might have our own arithmetic routines that allow
a representation of infinity, and do something reasonable for division
by zero.)
We also use recursion to implement recursion, when we recursively call
eval). But since we coded that recursion explicitly, we can easily
change it, and do something different. Our arithmetic expressions don't
have to have the same recursive structure as Scheme expressions.
We could also implement recursion ourselves. As written, our tiny
interpreter uses Scheme's activation "stack" to implement it's own
stack--each recursive call to eval implements a recursive call
in our input language. We didn't have to do this. We could have
implemented our own stack as a data structure, and written our interpreter
as a simple non-recursive loop. That would be tedious, however, so we
don't bother.
What counts as "snarfing"? The term is a good one, but not clearly
defined. If we call Scheme's read rather than using our own
reader, we clearly just snarf the Scheme reader, but we've done something
a little different with recursion. We've done something very different
with the interpretation of operator names.
Implementing a programming language well requires attention to the fine art of bootstrapping--how much of the system do you have to build "by hand" in some lower-level system, and how much can you build within the system itself, once you've got a little bit of it working.
Most Scheme systems are written mostly in Scheme, and in fact it's possible (but not particularly fun) to implement a whole Scheme system in Scheme, even on a machine that doesn't have a Scheme system yet.
How are these things possible?
First, let's take the simple case, where you're willing to write a little
code in another language. You can write an interpreter for a small subset
of Scheme in, say, C or assembler. Then you can extend that little language
by writing the rest of Scheme in Scheme--you just need a simple little
subset to get started, and then things you need can be defined in terms
of things you already have. Writing an interpreter for a subset of Scheme
in C is not hard--just a little tedious. Then you can use lambda
to create most of the rest of the procedures in terms of simpler
procedures. Interestingly, you can also implement most of the defining
constructs and control constructs of Scheme in Scheme, by writing
macros, which we'll discuss later.
You can start out this way even if you want your Scheme system to use a compiler. You can write the compiler in Scheme, and use the interpreter to run the compiler and generate machine code. Now you have a compiler for Scheme code, and can compile procedures so that they run faster than if you interpreted them. You can take most of the Scheme code that you'd been interpreting, and use the compiler to create faster versions of them. You then replace the old (interpreted) versions with the new (compiled) versions, and the system is suddenly faster.
Once the compiler works, you can compile the compiler, so that it runs faster. After all, a compiler is just a program that takes source code as input and generates executable code--it's just a program that happens to operate on programs. Now you're set--you have a compiler that can compile Scheme code that you need to run, including itself, and you don't need the interpreter anymore.
To get Scheme to work on a new system, without even needing an interpreter, you can cross-compile. If you have Scheme working on one kind of machine, but want to run it on another, you can write your Scheme compiler in Scheme, and have it run on one machine but generate code for the new machine. Then you can take the executable code it generates, copy it onto the new machine, and run it.
Most Scheme systems are built using tricks like this. For example, the RScheme system never had an interpreter at all. Its compiler was initially run in a different Scheme system (Scheme-48) and used to compile most of RScheme itself. This code was then used to run RScheme with no further assistance from another implementation.
The first Scheme system was built by writing a Scheme interpreter in Lisp, [ or was it a compiler first? ... blah blah ... ]