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Re: Translation for extension is a bad idea


On Tue, Jul 11, 2000 at 03:16:19PM -0700, Michael Vanier wrote:
> 
> However, the original goal of translators (to supply dialects of guile
> which don't have the parenthesized-prefix syntax for those who consider it
> distasteful) is, I believe, a good one.  Therefore, I'd rather see
> something like CTAX (with a better name, please) be developed as the
> "official infix syntax for guile" rather than lots of translators from tcl,
> python, perl etc. to guile.  Too many people are scared away from lisp-like
> languages due to the unfamiliar syntax; if we can ease their
> transition/enlightenment, we will benefit.  The language Objective Caml
> provides a very powerful preprocessor which can be used to modify the
> entire surface syntax of the language; in principle, guile could have
> something like this too.  However, this is a far cry from supporting (say)
> perl semantics in ocaml or guile (*shudder*).

As a deviation from my usual stance of supporting translators,
I have to step up to support this point of view. Guile's
support for three or four languages created specifically for
Guile (but "similar" to some others) will _always_ be better
and more full-featured than its support for tcl, python, perl
etc. Actually there is already a postfixed dialect for Guile
(it's called Sonya).

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