Hello Marc,
On Mon, 22 Nov 2010 14:10:46 -0500 Marc Feeley feeley@iro.umontreal.ca wrote:
...
I checked PHP, which I wasn't very familiar with, and it seems to have a similar syntax (in the sense of "program structure") as JavaScript. In particular they both have closures and GC, and don't have tail calls.
PHP made me a nasty surprise, I did not expect that a popular language implemented closures only recently:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4155254/anonymous-functions-lambdas-closu... `` Some changes have been made starting with PHP 5.3, but even there you don't have your expected variable scopes that would allow you to do what you have in your examples. ''
By the way, this is the reason why I stopped with CPSCM: this interesting project relies on the host language for implementing closures.
So if you start writing a back-end, I suggest that you supports both languages. In fact, you could support other target languages with similar properties (including Python, Ruby, elisp, ...). It should be easy to abstract the superficial differences between these languages in the "code generator" of the back-end.
The idea is great, but right now I'm not the right person who is able to make such abstraction.
Marc