Re: What is Guile?

[Jonathan Bartlett]

> Converting language X to Scheme, and then interpreting the Scheme is an
> interesting academic idea but if technology doesn't work for people then
> it doesn't work. Guile isn't the fastest Scheme interpreter in the
> world, and adding another layer of parsing and conversion will simply
> make things slower. If given the choice between a slow, subtly

It would only possibly make the loading slower.  Execution should be about
the same.  Even parsing should be about the same - you have to parse it no
matter what.  The only difference is the final parse tree.  So, I'm not
really sure that it would add overhead.

However, the real gem of this is the ability to come up with little
languages that exactly match your needs.  Specialized macro sets + helpful
syntax makes this easy and useful.

I got interested in scheme because of the possibility of language
converters.  Not even necessarily to current languages (although that's
certainly possible) but for embedding little languages and being able to
customize sandbox environments for scripts, which I do not believe is as
fully available for any other language as it is for scheme, specifically
GUILE.

Jon