Scheming, part 7. The Reader.

I haven’t ‘blogged about my Scheme interpreter in ages.  Development stopped from January through March, but I’ve been working on it again.  Here are links to the earlier articles.

• Scheming, part 6
• Scheming, part 5
• Announcing kbscheme
• Scheming, part 3
• Scheming, part 2
• Scheming, part 1
• Not another Scheme interpreter!

The biggest new development  is the reader.  Most developers call them parsers, but Lisp people call them readers.  I have written six readers for Scheme now, and I’ve effectively completed a class in advanced parsing theory.  The current reader works very well, and I do not want to write another.

Bimorphic methods in Python

Methods in Python are either instance methods (the default), static, or class methods.  You can create the latter two using the @staticmethod and @classmethod decorators.

But maybe it would be better to have a single function that can be called either as a class method or an instance method.  I coined the term bimorphic method for this, and I wrote a decorator that can make a method bimorphic.