Re: [Axiom-developer] Boot

[Gabriel Dos Reis]

root <address@hidden> writes:

| > > A total rewrite in lisp with defstruct et al. of the whole system
| > > is too ambitious for the number of people contributing. Besides,
| > > for a total rewrite one should consider other alternatives as
| > > well (aldor, ...).
| > 
| > I still wish for this but I am afraid that is controlled by
| > people with a different agenda.
| 
| controlled?

I suspect he was referring to Aldor.

[...]

| lisp is the implementation language of the interpreter and has been
| since the early 70s timeframe. coding it in lisp is not a departure. 

But in the light of improvements that happened since then, and
considering we're now in 2006, it is a backward step, the benefits of
which I fail to see.

| boot is an experiment in a paren-less lisp syntax. one of hundreds.
| if we wanted to use paren-less lisp syntax we should adopt python.

over my dead-body :-)

[...]

| you'll discover that you can't rewrite portions of the interpreter in
| either boot or python because they can't do the source-to-source
| transformations like defmacro and backquote. the interpreter lives
| to do source-to-source transformations.

Yes, but that does not necessarily imply everything must be written in
Lisp.  Your reasoning schema could be instantiated to argue fro
writing everything in assembly because there are lot of things one can
do in assembly, and impossible to achieve in a random higher-level language.

I'm very happy to write a very little tiny amount of code in Lisp, and
write the rest in Boot that brings other niceties and sugar.  Yes,
sugar is important.

-- Gaby