Re: language translator help

[John W. Eaton]

On 27-Apr-2002, Thomas Bushnell, BSG <address@hidden> wrote:

| "John W. Eaton" <address@hidden> writes:
| 
| > Thomas Bushnell also suggested generating Scheme forms using cons
| > instead of writing ASCII text.  Can this be done easily from C for
| > every language construct?  If so, it seems that it would be easy
| > enough to switch to this method once the translate-and-emit-text
| > system works.
| 
| Don't use C at all!  My compiler is a Scheme program.

That's a possibility.  I can see an advantage if you could have the
entire language implemented in Scheme, because then your language
works wherever Guile works, with no compiling necessary.

I have a significant amount of existing code in C/C++/Fortran for the
Octave parser, interpreter, and run-time that I was hoping to take
advantage of.  It may still make sense to reimplement most of the
parser in Scheme if the interpreter is replaced with Guile. It is
quite unlikely that the run-time library (including lots of things
like linear algebra subroutines that people expect to run as fast as
possible) will be rewritten in Scheme.  So, if there are significant
bits of the run-time library that will be written in C/C++/Fortran,
does it make a big difference if some of the parser is also written in
C/C++?

jwe