Re: language translator help

[Thien-Thi Nguyen]

   From: "John W. Eaton" <address@hidden>
   Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2002 11:36:57 -0500

   I don't want to start a language war, but while there are certainly
   some objective arguments that could be made about the capabilities of
   various computer languages, I think that whether Scheme is convenient
   and pleasing is mostly a matter of what problems you are trying to
   solve with the language, and of course, personal preference.

   FWIW, my mind has apparently been corrupted by procedural languages
   which have nice (to me at least, and I suspect I'm not the only one)
   looping constructs, to the point that the equivalent forms for looping
   in Scheme seem pretty "sucky" by comparison.  :-)

this is getting away from the real point that normally arises from these
kinds of discussions: the more translation (i.e., parsing and downstream
ilk) and execution can be separated, the easier the whole system is to
design, implement, extend and maintain.  i'm sure this is recognized, so
the question is: how to reflect that in the artifacts and build on it?

here's an artifact of my procrastination (on other guile duties):

                      octave-xlat-env     octave-exec-env
  
  use-modules         (lang octave xlat)  (lang octave exec)

  input               source (text)       procs/vars/"main" 
  
  operations          loop transforms     eval
                      other transforms
  
  side-effects        -                   "octave code" execution
  
  output              procs/vars/"main"   -

here, the procs/vars/"main" are scheme objects and structures.  perhaps
these can be serialized and written to disk (if it is desired to truly
demonstrate separation).  if the disk image has the appropriate header
it could be invoked from the command-line directly.

thi