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Re: difficulty of writing translators



b.stephens@isode.com writes:
> Jim Blandy <jimb@red-bean.com> writes:
> 
> > Someone needs to think about this carefully, and see how easily we
> > can mix Tcl's semantics with Scheme's semantics.  I expect there are
> > many strategies; whoever decides to start coding gets to make the
> > decisions.
> 
> This has already been done once, with Rush.  (Rush translated to a
> modified scheme, in order to accommodate variable tracing, which is
> important in Tcl.)  I don't think that Rush was ever released, but the
> Tcl FAQs have references to papers on it, which describe the
> strategies they used.

I believe the current guile maintainer is opposed to adding variable
tracing to Guile on the Scheme level. (IMO wrongly, because variable
traces can be used to create a really nice magical interface for
global configuration parameters. They'd look just like variables (you
could directly access or set! them), but the app could react
appropriately to changes in its parameters. I think traces are one of
the best ideas in Tcl.)

 - Maciej