Writing a simple Lisp interpreter in Rust

Lisp is a family of multi-paradigm programming languages (functional, procedural, reflective, …), which can be similar to Lambda Calculus. The name stands for “list processing”.

The syntax is based on the concept of S-Expression (short for: Symbolic Expression). The code is therefore organized in a tree-like data structure. In Lisp, code is data, and data is code.

In this article, we will write a very simple (non standard?) Lisp interpreter in Rust. This will be a great way to explore the Rust ecosystem, and what it can do for us…