An interesting idea

[Jonathan Bartlett <johnnyb at wolfram dot com>]

Maybe instead of having this "translator" idea.  We could steal an
existing (and working) idea.  Basically, guile would be two projects.

1) An embeddable scheme interpretter.  Wow.  That's what's going on and
working.  

2) Separate GIMP's PDB (I know not everyone is fond of PDB, but at least
have something to that effect) out, as a common mechanism for attaching
scripting language procedures to programs.  Have guile bindings included
by default in PDB.

Translators might be cool, but only as a kind of syntactic mode.
Languages with widely different paradigms would not be adequately
implemented with this idea, and you would still have to write wrappers to
all of the scheme functions for each language you build because we are no
longer writing in scheme, but in that language.  For example, in C, to
pass binary data, you pass _Both_ a pointer and the length.  In languages
like perl, you only pass the data itself.  Then, you would also have to
implement that language's standard library - yuck yuck yuck. Thus, it
would not really help as far as language bindings go.  If you have
something like the PDB, which simply contains procedural calls (which all
languages seem to handle rather well), all you would have to write is
bindings to the PDB, not to each function in the PDB.

Just an idea to throw out.

Jon