My XEmacs wish list

[Vladimir G. Ivanovic]

on 02/12/2008 11:29 AM Jerry James said the following:
  > 4. Extension language replacement
> Yes, this bogeyman has reared his head again.  The first stumbling
> block is *which* extension language to replace Elisp with.  There are
> lots of candidates; the choice is not easy.  Personally, I favor
> staying close to Lisp in order to minimize the porting effort.  Either
> Scheme or Common Lisp would be a good way to go.  But maybe it doesn't
> matter.  The C code is so full of Elisp dependencies that it would
> have to undergo major surgery, no matter what the final extension
> language.  And even changing to Scheme or Common Lisp won't save us
> from having to rewrite all of the Elisp in both core and the packages.

Automated translation? Since all Turing -complete languages are 
(formally) equivalent, really, it's just a simple matter of 
programming. <ducks>

I can imagine that there are Elisp constructs that are hard to 
translate automatically into, say, R5RS Scheme, but wouldn't most 
(more than 90%) of Elisp be amenable to automatic translation?

--- Vladimir

P.S. Peter Norvig's (now Director of Research at Google) comparison of 
Python and Lisp (http://norvig.com/python-lisp.html), is worth reading.

-- 

Vladimir G. Ivanovic


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
Url : http://lists.xemacs.org/pipermail/xemacs-beta/attachments/20080212/2cc736a7/signature.pgp