[gambit-list] An ancient legacy dialect
Hendrik Boom
hendrik at topoi.pooq.com
Sun Jun 16 11:19:37 EDT 2013
I have some thirty-year-old legacy code in what's best described as a
legacy dialect of Scheme. The important differences are:
* A different syntax for lists -- a slash can be used to introduce a
final sublist of a list. This reduces the piling up of lots of close
brackets when a list's last element is a list whose last element is a
list whose ... .
* A different syntax for 'let' that is to the regular 'let' as 'if' is
to 'cond'. This works well with the slash notation.
* Its own nonhygienic macro processor.
* No first-class continuations, though I wished I had them available
thirty years ago.
The existing implementation is bootstrapped from a subset of itself,
and involves an interpreter and translators to VAX assembly language.
I'd like to revive the legacy code that's written in that Scheme, and
it seems that a good approach would be to it translate to Gambit, and
thence to C. Perhaps starting with the bootstrap code and being
opportunistic after that.
Any suggestions as to a programmer-time efficient way to use or
modify existing tools to accomplish that?
-- hendrik
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