Re: language translator help

[Per Bothner]

John W. Eaton wrote:
> Well, I'm not sure.  But it is a lot of work to write an maintain an
> interperter for a special language, and much of that effort is
> duplicated by every scripting language.  People using Octave and Guile
> both want access to OS system calls and library functions (from basic
> stuff to GUI toolkits) so it seems wasteful to me that we build many
> interfaces to all these different libraries.  I think it would be much
> better to take advantage of existing work that's already been done.

Well, to toot my own horn:  The Kawa systems is not only a featureful
Scheme implementation that translates Scheme to Java bytecodes, it is
also a framework for compiling other languages into Java bytecodes.
Other languages handled by Kawa in addition to Scheme include a
non-trivial chunk of Emacs Lisp (see http://JEmacs.sourceforge.net/),
a smaller sub-set of Common Lisp, the  XQuery language for XML data
(see http://www.gnu.org/software/kawa/xquery/), and the Beautiful Report
Language (http://brl.sourceforge/net/).

All of these use the Java Virtual Machine as the interpreter.  E.g.
JEmacs uses Java bytecode where normal Emacs uses Emacs bytecodes.
However, Jawa translates one-the-fly and quickly to bytecodes.

See http://www.gnu.org/software/kawa/ and
http://www.gnu.org/software/kawa/internals.html.
--
        --Per Bothner
address@hidden   http://www.bothner.com/per/