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Translators, yet once more (Re: PHP fork project- Guile vs Python vs ?)


On Mon, Jul 10, 2000 at 02:04:30AM +0200, Mikael Djurfeldt wrote:
> 
> The reason why we haven't seen translators isn't that it's not
> possible to write them.
> 
> The fact that few people have worked on this is not evidence that the
> idea itself is bad.  Example: More effort has been spent on a new
> module system than on translators, and we still have to do more to
> reach the goal.  Yet, it is clearly possible to write good module
> systems for Scheme.

As someone interested in Guile primarily for the idea of
translators (despite it being a cool implementation of a cool
language and quite nice to embed), I have to support Mikael here:

writing translators without a decent module system would be a
major PITA, and writing translators for a lot of languages (for
example, Python and Smalltalk) without GOOPS would be simply
meaningless.

Also, many "smart" languages (like Python and Scheme itself)
have a few "tricks" and proposital idiosyncrasies (like
__getitem__, __len__, __getattr__ etc in Python) which would
probably be inpractical to emulate; so we can more or less
safely say there will never be a real Python->Scheme
translator, but instead from a language with the same syntax as
Python but not exactly the same semantics, to something Guile
can read (perhaps Scheme, perhaps some internal representation).

The same probably holds true for most other existing languages
(of course if we come up with new languages, like was the case
with ctax, this won't be a problem).

[]s,
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