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Re: C# is not Dylan (was: Re: C# : The new language from M$)
On Mon, 14 Aug 2000 10:30:01 -0400 (EDT), Hugh Greene <q@tardis.ed.ac.uk>
wrote:
> On Fri, 11 Aug 2000, David McClain wrote:
> > Sorry for joining in so late... But wouldn't it be a pretty simple task to
> > design a Lisp-ish front end translator to the existing Dylan compilers? That
> > would satisfy the Lispers among us and give us back our powerful macro
> > system (warts and all!).
>
> Fairly simple for the core syntax, although there might be some syntactic
> subtleties or ways in which "Lisp/Scheme-like Dylan" would confuse
> Lispers/Schemers, which would be bad. (For example, how do "lists which
> are function calls" and "lists which are quoted" compare?)
>
> The real killer is user-written macros. If people have to "port" their
> macros between the two surface syntaxes, that's extra hassle and some
> people probably wouldn't bother. If you want to (semi-)automate it, I
> would guess that's a non-trivial problem; it's surely even harder if you
> want to "transliterate" and not just translate, i.e., make macros suit the
> standard idioms of each syntax.
>
> Having said that, it sounds like a really cool project :-)
Harlequin had a LTD conversion tool (Lisp to Dylan) which bootstrapped some
projects I think. I don't know where that is now. However, if the goal is to
have procedural macros in Dylan then they already exist in FunDev, but are not
currently available to users.
__Jason
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