kawa goals

[Jamison Hope]

On Oct 14, 2010, at 6:24 AM, Helmut Eller wrote:

> * Per Bothner [2010-10-14 07:27] writes:
>
>> Actually, I was thinking about asking people for requests.
>> I.e. if there was one or two improvements to Kawa you could vote
>> for, what would they be?  For example we could work on: support for
>> annotations; easier gui programming; improved R6RS compatibility;  
>> call/cc;
>> persistence; database access; easier web programming; better
>> type inference; sequence/iteration APIs; Scala-like "views"; data
>> binding; string template syntax; etc etc.
>
> Out of those: iteration.  At least something like Common Lisp's LOOP  
> or
> ITERATE.  Ideally something like SERIES[1] (with loop fusion for  
> nested
> series expressions) combined with a terse comprehension syntax for the
> common case (i.e. map+filter+reduce).
>
> In general, make Kawa more "friendly", e.g. add doc-strings, make it
> easy to find the source file of functions, add an object inspector  
> etc.
>
> [OTOH, to become "rich and famous" you should probably do something
> related to parallelism and/or cluster/cloud computing :-)]
>
> Helmut
>
> [1] http://series.sourceforge.net/

+1 for docstrings. Especially if we had a tool which would scan a
source file for docstrings and generate Javadoc from them (bonus
points if it does this by generating a real com.sun.javadoc.RootDoc
and passing it to a specified Doclet).

I would also very much like to see support for annotations. In fact, I
suspect that an Annotation would be a reasonable way to implement
docstrings, since they're a form of meta-data which should be
available at runtime.

I don't have a good feel for what incompatibilities remain between
Kawa and the R6RS spec; an update to
http://www.gnu.org/software/kawa/Restrictions.html would be helpful.

I know some folks who would like to see a page describing the status
of Common Lisp support, too.


Jamie

--
Jamison Hope
The PTR Group
www.theptrgroup.com