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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 > <------------------------------------------------------------------->