[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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