Re: [Chicken-users] Other Cheney-MTA systems?

[Felix]

From: Peter Bex <address@hidden>
Subject: Re: [Chicken-users] Other Cheney-MTA systems?
Date: Sat, 13 Nov 2010 13:29:38 +0100

> On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 07:23:41PM -0500, John Tobey wrote:
>> Hi all,
>> 
>> Anyone know of an active project or system other than Chicken that uses the
>> machine's stack in a similar way?
> 
> At T-DOSE someone mentioned that REBOL uses this technique.
> I was able to find this reference http://ll1.ai.mit.edu/marshall.html
> but the wikipedia page and their download page at rebol.com seems
> to indicate they're on version 2.7.7.  I'm not sure if that version
> still uses this technique and if it doesn't, why not.

I'm not completely sure, but seem to remember that using this
technique was considered a failure in REBOL, as it was too complex to
maintain.  This is understandable, since coding an interpreter in this
style is awkward (to say the least). But having a compiler generate
such code is a different thing and not much worse than what other
compilers generate.

Another language implementation using this method is not known to me,
which is a pity. That may be caused because doing it this way is so
unorthodox and because CPS compilers have become unfashionable.

Another point is that, taditionally, Lisp implementors are quite
conservative ...


cheers,
felix