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

[Gabriel Dos Reis]

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

| Gabriel Dos Reis wrote:
| 
| > 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.
| 
| Well ... SBCL is a re-write of CMUCL, which I thought was freely
| available, except on Windows.

Well, in fact, you can check it out: SBCL is also available on Windows.

[...]

| Well, considering the long history of Axiom and its predecessors, that's
| not surprising. But once you *have* Axiom capable of compiling itself,
| do you really need the underlying scaffolding, or can you take it down
| and just use the building?

But we don't have Axiom compiling itself right now, and to ensure we
get rid of the lower level, we first need to cover enough platforms
which we don't either.  Nowadays, Haskell compiles itself and you need
a working Haskell to compile Haskell.  If you really need to port to a
new platform where no Haskell exists then you can download the
translated C source files and used them as bootstrapping Haskell.
That is quite a common thing to do.

| > 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.
| 
| I just buzzed through the SPJ slides. I've been a big fan of functional
| programming languages, denotational semantics, etc. since Lisp 1.5. I
| haven't bothered to learn Haskell or any of the ML family yet, partly
| because I don't get paid to write in functional languages, and partly

I didn't get paid either.

| because of all the functional languages around today, the one that I
| think has the strongest legs is Erlang. *That's* the one I'm learning at
| the moment.
| 
| As far as DSLs are concerned, since I also hang out with the Ruby crowd,
| I'm familiar with DSLs. I don't necessarily think they're a good thing

Well, the point is that, each time you write an application, you write
in a DSL: usually a subset of the base language augmented with
libraries.  Now, one can go further adding syntactic sugar and
appropriate optimizatins, etc.

| -- I much prefer, as you seem to, higher-level abstractions in
| programming languages. You may need a hierarchy of languages to get
| there, but do you need it forever?

When you don't get to bootstrap yourself, yes.

[...]

| > Standard ML compilers were once written in Lisp.  They are no more.
| 
| Are they written in Standard ML?

Most of them are now written in SML complitemented with a bit of C.

-- Gaby