I always see Scheme books defining Scheme in terms of Scheme. SICP calls this a "metacircular evaluator". Why are these books unable to resist the temptation to write a Scheme interpreter using Scheme? Isn't it narcissistic?
Are the authors lazy and narcissistic, with the metacircular evaluators being a mirror of their own true selves?
This is the penultimate exercise in SICP:
Exercise 5.51: Develop a rudimentary implementation of Scheme in C (or some other low-level language of your choice) by translating the explicit-control evaluator of 5.4 into C. In order to run this code you will need to also provide appropriate storage-allocation routines and other run-time support.
As usual: "left to the reader as an exercise", "no answers provided".
Pure laziness.
yes, writing an english grammar book in english is unacceptable!!!
Don't you think it's remarkable and exciting that the language can implement itself so easily?
LISP was the first language that was described in terms of itself, it was an important result in the history of programming, some even call it the ``Maxwell's equations of software''!
Maxwell's equations of software
These Lispers know no limits when it comes to self-aggrandizement.