Re: What's so cool about Scheme?

[Steve Dekorte <address@hidden>]

On Friday, June 6, 2003, at 03:36 AM, Shriram Krishnamurthi wrote:
> Second, saying it's "about how to implement a Scheme in Scheme" is
> potentially misleading.  It does cover meta-circular interpreters, but
> it also does some amount of syntactic interpretation.  The latter
> makes the interpreter essentially language independent.

 From what I remember, the only thing that might be considered 
non-Scheme are some syntax additions made on top of Scheme(which were 
implemented in Scheme). But I might have missed something. If you want 
to learn about implementing a language in Scheme(or "why Scheme is 
cool"), you might find this book helpful. If your interested in 
implementing a language in C/C++, you might be disappointed. It's an 
expensive book, so you might want to check it out before ordering it 
sight-unseen from Amazon.

> Finally, 1/e's handling of OO is weak, but 2/e gets religion.

If that means more on implementing an OO stuff in Scheme, then I'm not 
sure how helpful that is to a language implementor is unless you 
consider it practical to implement one scripting language in 
another(sort of like implementing Python in Perl) or you consider 
putting some OO-stuff on top of Scheme as a suitable solution for the 
OO language you'd like to implement(maybe it is).

If you're pro-Scheme, these criticisms might seem odd. But imagine a 
book on implementing Perl, some modifications of Perl syntax and 
"objects" in Perl, and ask yourself how you'd feel about it as a 
general book on programming languages, even if it does deal with a 
range of control structures.

Cheers,
Steve
Io, a small language: http://www.iolanguage.com/