Re: LFM + LFSP = LFE?

[Adam Turoff <address@hidden>]

On Fri, Jun 13, 2003 at 06:34:40PM -0700, Michael Vanier wrote:
> Parenthetically (pun intended), the guile scheme people did this a few
> years ago but abandoned the effort.

Which effort are you talking about?

I seem to remember a project that used Guile in conjunction with partial
evaluation.  The idea was to map syntaxes like Perl, Tcl, Python, etc.
onto scheme and have just the one runtime.  Nice in theory, but horrible
in practice.

One reason why that project failed was that it was just too broad and
ambitious: Perl folks are quite fond of pointing out that 'only Perl can
parse perl'.  That is, the only way to interpret a Perl program is to
implement all of the idiosyncratic behaviors the perl interpreter supports
today.  Partial evaluation of Perl into Guile would involve faithfully
reimplementing the perl, a holy grail that's been attempted multiple times
but not yet achieved.

Z.