Re: My XEmacs wish list
"Vladimir G. Ivanovic" <vgivanovic(a)comcast.net> writes:
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>
There are two issues: Translation for running, which is reasonably easy.
(Been done at least twice for Scheme, by Matt Birkholz and Eric Knauel.)
The tricky bit is translation for continued maintenance, which is an
ongoing research issue. (With a lot of work done, mostly by Matthias
Neubauer and Eric Knauel, but still some ways to go.)
But even for "translation for running", there's a lot of work to be
done. The tricky bit is separating the XEmacs kernel from the language.
The first huge step is the GC separation, which Marcus Crestani has
done. (Mostly, right?) The next step would be loosening the coupling
of the XEmacs core code to Lisp control and binding.
--
Cheers =8-} Mike
Friede, Völkerverständigung und überhaupt blabla
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