Re: Emacs in ANSI CL

Kent M Pitman <pitman@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> So all this to say I'm not just idly speculating when I say that it
> should be possible, given the energy I've seen in the open source
> community, to do a port to ANSI CL in relatively finite time.

I don't think anyone is disputing that it's possible. It's just a lot
of work (as you note), and neither the GNU Emacs or XEmacs developers
seem very interested in a conversion. Those who are interested don't
have enough resources.

> There is, of course, the "little detail" of making sure the core
> Lisp platform you are using actually has all the functionality you
> want. A lot of translation is just syntax.

The elisp code wouldn't necessarily have to be translated to CL. It
could be ran in a elisp implementation written in CL, and that problem
has been solved at least twice.

The bigger problem, I believe, is translating the large body of
functions written in C, and that translation isn't exactly "just
syntax".

> I'd welcome commentary from anyone [Erik?] who has tried a
> conversion effort of this kind already as to whether any of the
> above analysis is flawed...

I think most of the previous and current efforts are reimplementations
from scratch.
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: syntax directed translation
    ... > Are syntax directed translation and syntax directed definition ... appearing in that production. ... and the semantic rules as separate items that are paired with each ...
    (comp.compilers)
  • Re: Aspects of programming languages in common
    ... A lot of language suites consist of front ends for C, ... They undergo a syntax evaluation before being ... > My understanding of the proposal is to perform the translation to ... There would then be a consistent base upon which to build the parse tree, ...
    (comp.programming)
  • Re: C# very optimisation
    ... is to consider what you can't do with a particular syntax: ... The most basic form is ... Since the compiler was very stupid with no optimizations, ... But a different translation required a different syntax, ...
    (microsoft.public.dotnet.languages.csharp)
  • Re: Aspects of programming languages in common
    ... A lot of language suites consist of front ends for C, ... My understanding of the proposal is to perform the translation to ... a "neutral" language before performing any syntax checks. ... number in the original source code? ...
    (comp.programming)