Re: difficulty of writing translators

[Jim Blandy <jimb@red-bean.com>]

> I don't see exactly what the problem is.  I suppose there are big
> problems if you contemplate trying to map elisp fcns to their
> corresponding scheme functions, but are there big problems just
> implementing an elisp interpreter in scheme?

Certainly, I can implement Emacs Lisp in Scheme.  Or I can implement Elisp
in C and include it as a module in Guile.  Or whatever.  In that
sense, there's no problem reconciling Guile with any language you can
imagine.

The real issues come up when you want smooth communication between the
languages.  The type space of Emacs Lisp and Scheme are so
tantalizingly similar (as you noted) that it's horribly tempting to
try to make them share data in the obvious way, and call each others'
functions in an obvious way.  And since Emacs Lisp is one of the big
intended applications of Guile, it makes sense to go to a bit of
effort to succumb to that temptation.