Re: guile/guile-core/libguile eval.c

[Marius Vollmer]

Mikael Djurfeldt <address@hidden> writes:

> The main point is that it's kind of silly to have to do this kind of
> tests in the inner loop of the evaluator.

Yes, but note that the test is only done once at the start of
evaluating a body.  It is not done for every form of the body.  The
updating itself is only done on top-level of course, and I think we
don't need to worry too much about the performance there.

> We could have an alternative loop for top-level bodies and have the
> macro expansion facilities (expand body?) insert suitable code to
> invoke it (maybe a new top-level begin macro?).

Yes.  We would also need new case, cond, if, and, or macros.  (Are
there more?)  What we could do more easily is to have bodies that
known that they are not in a top-level environment (closures, let, do,
etc) jump directly to the non-toplevel part of the body executor.