[kazinator]

A counter-counter argument is that implementing a language that is semantically distant from assembly language, over top of assembly language, counts as "from scratch", whereas skinning a language over with an interpreter (which doesn't even scan tokens, collect garbage or perform any I/O) doesn't count as "from scratch".

[bdowling]

What's the language that is semantically distant from Lisp, implemented over Lisp?

[kazinator]

An example that pops to mind might be Shen. (In fact the subject of a HN submission just within the past several days.)