Re: Doc organization (Re: Around again, and docs lead role)

[Ricard Mira]

Max Techter wrote:
>         Your mentioning of once formulated goals
>         for the guile project fits quite well.

The article "GNU Extension Language Plans" by Richard Stallman is
relevant too.  It explains the Guile rationale.

http://www.vanderburg.org/Tcl/war2/0000.html

This is its conclusion:

------
Conclusion

Until today, users have not been able to choose which extension
language to use. They have always been compelled to use whichever
language is supposed by the tool they wish to extend. And that has
meant many different languages for different tools.

Adopting Tcl as the universal scripting language offers the
possibility of eliminating the incompatibility--users would be able to
extend everything with just one language. But they wouldn't be able
to choose which language. They would be compelled to use Tcl and
nothing else.

By making modified Scheme the universal extension language, we can
give users a choice of which language to write extensions in. We can
implement other languages, including modified Tcl (Rush), a Python
variant, and a C-like language, through translation into Scheme, so
that each user can choose the language to use. Even users who choose
modified Tcl will benefit from this decision--they will be happy with
the speedup they get from an implementation that translates into
Scheme.

Only Scheme, or something close to Scheme, can serve this purpose.
Tcl won't do the job. You can't implement Scheme or Python or Emacs
Lisp with reasonable performance on top of Tcl. But modified Scheme
can support them all, and many others.

The universal extension language should be modified Scheme.