Re: Translator and R5RS

[Keisuke Nishida]

Michael Livshin <address@hidden> writes:

> > I'm thinking about the design of a new compiler for my VM, which works
> > in 3 steps:
(snip)
> looks good, except I don't really understand why macro expansion
> should be done in the "translate" phase.  indeed, the "read" and
> "translate" phases are begging to be one phase, unless I'm missing
> something.  I mean, what language needs the Scheme macro facility
> except for Scheme itself?

I was thinking that, even in the same Scheme, there are some minor
differences in people's syntactic preference.  For example, "foo.bar"
is a symbol foo.bar in R5RS, while I'd like it if it is expanded into
(bar foo).  Hmm, maybe this should be controlled by a reader option,
and I don't need to separate the two phases.

> also, unrelatedly, perhaps you could try to make your new compiler
> (the "translate" phase at least) support some extendable GOOPS'y
> protocol, so people could plug in new optimizations and stuff.

Right.  I'll try.