[gambit-list] Google Summer of Code

Christian Jaeger christian at pflanze.mine.nu
Wed Mar 12 13:05:23 EDT 2008


Taylor R Campbell wrote:
>    Date: Wed, 12 Mar 2008 14:52:40 +0100
>    From: Christian Jaeger <christian at pflanze.mine.nu>
>
>    - especially after the above infrastructure is well in place, study the 
>    existing approaches of modularization and syntax handling out there 
>    (Scheme48, MzScheme, Chicken's attempts at mixing syntax systems, 
>    riaxpander (http://mumble.net/~campbell/darcs/riaxpander/), R6RS, ERR5RS)
>
> A word or two of advice on this subject.  `Mixing syntax systems' in
> the manner pioneered by Chicken is an excellent way to lose badly, and
> it would be a mistake to replicate this lossage elsewhere.  Also,
> unless you think about macros in conjunction with modules from the
> beginning, you will not have an easy time tacking them on later.
> Riaxpander makes parts of this easier, but you'll still need to think
> about these issues well in advance.
>   

Thanks for the heads-up, Riastradh.

Yes, thoughts about syntax issues will have to be part of the work as 
soon as possible. What I currently wonder about is whether a 
"syntactical tower" (if that's the right term for a way to process 
source code in an ordered pipeline of predefined processors, each 
accepting a certain language as input and delivering another ("lower 
level") one as output) can solve the problems.

BTW is there some documentation or discussion to read up about your work 
(objective, inner workings..) on Riaxpander somewhere?

Christian.




More information about the Gambit-list mailing list