Re: Why not to implement everything in scheme?

[Han-Wen Nienhuys]

address@hidden writes:
> 
> I'd prefer RubyPond :-)
> 
> To be serious: the current implementation is o.k., and, IIRC, Han-Wen
> mentioned in the interview at linuxmusician.com that the C++ part is
> planned to shrink away.
> 
> I also thought a lot of wether using scheme/guile as semi-backend is the
> best choice. It's a matter of taste and readability. Personally, I don't
> like scheme very much; allthough it's small and easy to learn, it's IMHO
> difficult to read and looks ugly. Thus, using something like Ruby *may*
> be an alternative, possibly attracting more volunteers, possibly not.
> 
> Anyways. Wether you like/disklike C++, Scheme, Ruby, Python, Haskell,
> whatever: those who do participate in active LilyPond development should
> concentrate on improving LilyPond, not in using endless time by changing
> the languages used. At least not until a certain point of stabilization
> has been reached.

For the interested reader - when we were considering an extension
system, we also thought about Python. However, python did not have
garbage collection, its objects seemed rather heavyweight (memory
wise) and the scoping rules were counter intuitive.

A big bonus point for Scheme/LISP was the #( .. ) lexer hack, which is
not really possible in other languages. That hack made it really very
easy to gradually migrate the file format to syntactic sugar for
Scheme.


-- 

 Han-Wen Nienhuys   |   address@hidden   |   http://www.xs4all.nl/~hanwen