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Logo->Guile

I was thinking a bit about languages, aesthetics, and ease of
translation, and I started thinking about Logo.

I think a Logo->Guile translator would be quite feasible, efficient,
and powerful.  And I think Logo in many ways makes for a better
scripting language for these reasons:

  * Syntactically efficient.  Few scary ()'s, infix operators.
  * Designed to be easy to learn.
  * It acts a lot like the Algol languages people are used to.

Here's why the translation shouldn't be too hard:

  * It's a Lispish language (that's what the "L" stands for... I don't 
    remember what the "OGO" stands for).
  * There's no standard so you can munge the language to make it more 
    like Scheme without anyone being offended.  (In particular,
    lexical scoping and giving it real closures)

Now, C-TAX hasn't really caught on.  But I think part of that was that
it hasn't been well-packaged for quite some time nor well-distributed.
When it was first made there weren't enough Guile apps to make it very
worth-while to use.  After all, the people who use a translator
probably don't *want* to learn a lot about Guile (if they did they'd
probably learn to use and love Scheme).  And for scripting there
should be a low overhead of learning because a lot of scripting is
casual and doesn't warrant a large investment of time.  C-TAX has to
be easy to use at all levels before it becomes a good alternative.
Ditto for Logo, if such a thing should happen.


I have a number of ideas about things you could do to make Logo very
similar to Scheme and easy to translate, and I'm very tempted to work
on it -- but I must resist my temptation to get distracted.  I thought
I'd put the idea out, though.


<------------------------------------------------------------------->
< Ian Bicking                 |  bickiia@earlham.edu                >
< drawer #419 Earlham College |  http://www.cs.earlham.edu/~bickiia >
< Richmond, IN 47374          |  (765) 973-2824                     >
<------------------------------------------------------------------->