guile-reader 0.1: A reader framework for Guile

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

I have been working on a simple framework for building readers for
Guile.  It is called `guile-reader' and version 0.1 is available at:

  http://www.laas.fr/~lcourtes/software/guile/guile-reader-0.1.tar.gz
  SHA1:  d0a6740b4d7390e914199b0cb673355a02dd74d9

Documentation (incomplete) can be read at:

  http://www.laas.fr/~lcourtes/software/guile/guile-reader.html

The idea is to provide an extensible, yet fast, reader for Guile.
Guile already provides facilities for extending its reader (namely
`read-hash-extend' and `read-enable') but these seem (i) quite limited
and (ii) have a global impact (there is only one instance of `read').

Guile-reader aims to provide a way to easily define new readers, while
still allowing to re-use parts of a standard Scheme reader.  New reader
components (called ``token readers'') may be defined either as Scheme
procedures or C functions.  It uses GNU Lightning (where available) to
compile readers to native code, hence allowing to have performance
comparable to that of Guile's built-in reader, but with improved
maintainability.

Guile-reader currently targets Guile 1.7 but it could trivially be
ported to other versions of Guile.

I'd be glad to have feedback from Guile users as to the usefulness of
this approach, its shortcomings, etc.

Thanks,
Ludovic.