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From: | Per Bothner |
Subject: | Re: language translator help |
Date: | Sat, 27 Apr 2002 23:53:14 -0700 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0rc1) Gecko/20020417 |
John W. Eaton wrote:
Well, I'm not sure. But it is a lot of work to write an maintain an interperter for a special language, and much of that effort is duplicated by every scripting language. People using Octave and Guile both want access to OS system calls and library functions (from basic stuff to GUI toolkits) so it seems wasteful to me that we build many interfaces to all these different libraries. I think it would be much better to take advantage of existing work that's already been done.
Well, to toot my own horn: The Kawa systems is not only a featureful Scheme implementation that translates Scheme to Java bytecodes, it is also a framework for compiling other languages into Java bytecodes. Other languages handled by Kawa in addition to Scheme include a non-trivial chunk of Emacs Lisp (see http://JEmacs.sourceforge.net/), a smaller sub-set of Common Lisp, the XQuery language for XML data (see http://www.gnu.org/software/kawa/xquery/), and the Beautiful Report Language (http://brl.sourceforge/net/). All of these use the Java Virtual Machine as the interpreter. E.g. JEmacs uses Java bytecode where normal Emacs uses Emacs bytecodes. However, Jawa translates one-the-fly and quickly to bytecodes. See http://www.gnu.org/software/kawa/ and http://www.gnu.org/software/kawa/internals.html. -- --Per Bothner address@hidden http://www.bothner.com/per/
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