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Re: continuation theory (Re: Translators, yet once more)


Telford Tendys <telford@eng.uts.edu.au> writes:

> To be a full-blown scheme implementation, guile must support the
> scheme philosophy, which is not going to suit users who want their
> chance to control the low level implemention nitty gritty (i.e. who
> want decent performance).

interesting.  could you explain that further, I'm having trouble with
some of the logic.

> To be an embedded language, guile must be small and must not impose
> a burden on the application writers (its current GC system does
> impose quite a burden for applications that use their own storage
> allocation conventions especially when the authors of those
> applications don't understand GC).

you want to interact with a GC'ed system from C and not have to
understand GC?  why, you can, but it'll be a very superficial
interaction.  I'm not sure you'd want to.

or perhaps I misunderstood your point?

[ come to think of it, what is there to not understand about GC as a
  concept?  perhaps you mean the specific conservative GC
  implementation used by Guile? ]

> To be a high performance (speed) language it needs a white hot
> compiler and for scheme that implies a compiler that can resolve all
> the undeclared implementation issues that scheme programmers are
> told they don't have to think about (i.e. major research project).

it's not a major research project anymore, as all imaginable research
have already been done, sometimes many times over.

it's a lot of work to implement, though.

[ note: white hot performance is a nice thing to have, but is not one
  of the _main_ Guile goals. ]

> Because guile has no focus, there is no ``right'' way to do anything
> in guile because there is always the question ``when you say right,
> what is this going to be right for?'' the inevitable answer is
> ``everything'' and the end result is ``nothing much''.

examples?

-- 
A CONS is an object which cares.
                -- Bernie Greenberg.


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