Re: What is Guile?

[Marius Vollmer]

Ricard Mira <address@hidden> writes:

> Tom Lord wrote:
> >     > From: Ricard Mira <address@hidden>
> >     >
> >     > What is Guile?
> >     >
> >     > Guile is the GNU *multi-lingual extensibility interpreter*.  The
> >     > goal of the Guile project is to give users a choice of extension
> >     > language.
> >
> > As a point of history, being multi-lingual was _a_ goal, but certainly
> > not _the_ goal.   RMS still highlights the multi-lingual goal in some
> > of his talks, but I think he is misplacing emphasis.
> 
> It seems that the goal is to make Guile a *potential* multi-lingual
> environment which will allow people to implement languages as
> translators, making Guile an *actual* multi-lingual environment for
> extending programs.  Is it right?

Yes.  As far as I am concerned, I'll promise support for people that
want to write translators (support in the form of low-level stuff that
goes beyond Scheme, say), but I don't think that it is important for
Guile to have offer multiple somehow equivalent syntaxes/semantics.

Indeed, I would even say that putting the muli-lingual stuff at the
top of the feature list of Guile is dangerous.  It is very easy to
fail in direct competition to Python, say.  This woudn't do us any
good when we state Guile's reason for living as being multi-lingual
and I see the risk of failing as very real.

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