Guile & Octave (was Re: Docstring question)

[David Lutterkort <lutter at cise dot ufl dot edu>]

"John W. Eaton" <jwe@bevo.che.wisc.edu> writes:

> On  8-Dec-1999, Daschbach, John L <John.Daschbach@pnl.gov> wrote:
> 
> | Octave with guile scripting would be out of this world.
> 
> That's the reason I subscribed to this list.  Unfortunately, I've had
> to give up on any use of guile in Octave, at least temporarily.

I have been dreaming about this a lot lately, mainly because I am fed up
with Matlab's quirky home-cooked programming language which seems to become
more quirky with every release (cell arrays anybody ?)

I guess a good first step would be to hook libcruft from octave into
guile. Then a good schemey notation for index ranges has to be invented
(that's one of the things that Matlab got right) and maybe, one day,
implement the interpreter for Octave into Guile. I guess this would be the
most difficult part of the project and require some serious lexer/parser
support in Guile; that's where Mikael Djurfeldt's idea of hooking flex
and bison into Guile would come in handy.

I would be very interested in learning what you (or anybody else) thinks
are the main problems, possible benefits etc. are of following that
approach. 

David