Re: [Axiom-developer] Re: bootstrap Meta/Boot

[Gabriel Dos Reis]

"M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <address@hidden> writes:


[...]

| As a user who can't quite find the time to get involved with Axiom on a
| deeper level, I must say I find the plethora of languages in the Axiom
| development scheme quite daunting. Let's see: there's Axiom, Boot, SPAD,
| Aldor *and* Common Lisp, not counting the underlying C that most of the
| Common Lisps are built in. If *I* were building Axiom from "scratch",
| I'd start with Common Lisp, because Common Lisp compilers are pretty
| good. 

In fact that is open to debate, by reality check.  The only "good"
Common Lisp compiler I know freely available is SBCL, and we don't
support it right now.  And Common Lisp actually gives you very little
support to write useful programs.

In fact, once I got deep into Axiom internals, I found (Common) Lisp
just too low level, incomplete and unhelpful by times.  As probably
did the original designers and developers of Axiom; and they developed
languages to help them accomplish their tasks.

Check out Domain Specific Languages (DSLs).  Or if you're washing
SPJ's talk, you've probably have heard it by now.  Note also that 
Boot+Spad are close to Haskell and ahead of their times.  We want
that.  In particular, we don't want to indefinitely stay at the 
low level of Lisp.

Standard ML compilers were once written in Lisp.  They are no more.

-- Gaby