Re: My XEmacs wish list
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
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