Re: Wisp as shipped language in Guile?

[Arne Babenhauserheide]

Hi Nala,

Nala Ginrut <address@hidden> writes:

> Personally, I'd like to see many languages on Guile. But I prefer  maintain
> mine, guile-lua-rebirth and a new shell language(undone) as an external
> package.
> GNU official project reviews contributions too strictly, it's good for the
> quality and free software ethics, but too difficult for new contributors as
> a compromise.
> I will be happy to see if wisp accepted to be in Guile core. But if not,
> it's not a big deal IMO, especially when we have Guix now.
> What do you think?

I would prefer to invest the work needed to get wisp accepted into Guile
core, because that opens up new usecases and makes using it much easier
for new users on multiple platforms.

Wisp as external package is already available and gets much more
attention than I had anticipated (easily more than anything else on my
site) and I’d like to remove the hurdle of having to install a package.

I think the maintenance effort won’t be a limiting factor, because Wisp
is pretty much completed. I did not see any need to add anything for
more than two years, and the core code changed very little while I
experiemented with structures which do not need any work on the parser
itself. It might need minor fixes or tweaks, but aside from that I see
wisp the Guile-language as done.

Thanks to syntax-case, they can be implemented without having to touch
anything in modules/language/. One example is duel, which turns this
into a valid game script:


Enter : Galtag Nimbleday
_______ Lowlife Pirate

Lowlife Pirate
_ You will lay down your life today!

Galtag Nimbleday
_ We’ll see about that.

Duel
_ Galtag Nimbleday
_ Lowlife Pirate


(the underscores are added to ensure that this code is still valid if
copied from a non-indentation-preserving mailing list archive site)

This is the advantage of making Wisp an extremely thin wrapper around
Scheme (actually the thinnest possible full-featured¹ indentation-based
representation of Scheme I could find): Whatever is added in Guile is
directly available via Wisp.

¹: with full-featured meaning that the Wisp can represent any and all
   Scheme structures without overly ugly corner-cases and without
   crutches: it has no special casing for stuff which is en vogue today.

Therefore I want to get it included as a standard language in Guile.

Best wishes,
Arne
-- 
Unpolitisch sein
heißt politisch sein
ohne es zu merken

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