Translators to guile

[Klaus Schilling <Klaus.Schilling@home.ivm.de>]

Ivan Toshkov writes:
 > In guile's home page it is stated that by linking to guile you'll be able to
 > support other languages like CTAX.

Another language that Stallman wants to have supported soonish is Emacs Lisp,
so that guile may be used for future editions of GNU emacs in a backward
compatible way. 

How will one write the display code? Theoretically a curses wrapper, once
it works reliably, could do that on a text console, but would be horribly
slow and in addition one would need to some totally different approach for
e.g. gtk or harmony display , which is not supported by yet the GNU emacs, 
and the existing athena, motif and plain x11 stuff. So that would be a
lame approach. Something general stubs, written in C, with dynamically 
loadable frontends for termcap, gtk, harmony, athena, tk, lesstiff, ... 
would sound fine and possibly more efficient. Are there any plans to do so?

Jim Blandy seems to have solved some major pitfalls in handling elisp, the
#f vs. '() dilemma. Macro handling in elisp is also slightly different from
that in scheme, which caused me several sleepless nights in translating
elisp code to scheme by hand (elib container structures).

And the big 3 scripters, i.e. perl, python and tcl, should also come asap,
but perl and tcl have a syntax that are a pain in the tail to handle, let
alone the semantics. The other string processing languages (m4, awk etc.)
aren't much better. Somehow those string processing langs have yet an 
important role in many GNU tools which are to be replaced with guile once
possible: automake, autoconf, dejagnu on top of them.
--
Klaus Schilling