Re: Emacs rewrite in a maintainable language

[Óscar Fuentes]

John Wiegley <address@hidden> writes:

>>>>>> Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> On second thought, I don't think I understand the idea at all. What does it
>> mean "a Lispy language, easy to learn"? Is it a Lisp dialect, or is it C
>> with a set of Lisp-like macros preprocessed into C? What exactly are the C
>> aspects that we are trying to save the programmer from? And which part(s) of
>> the core do we expect to be able to rewrite in this "Lispy" language?
>
> Picture what we currently write in C, but a Lisp syntax, and all the macros we
> currently use removed. So, the essence of our C, written like it was Lisp.
>
> If that Lisp can get close enough to Emacs Lisp, so that knowing one means
> knowing the other, we've just made it easier for anyone to write what we now
> have to write in C.

Yes.

> I can imagine that complex things, like type declarations, would be done with
> anti-quoted blocks, or by direct support for inclusion of header files.

The project I made for extending/replacing a C++ code base uses Clang
for parsing the headers, extracting the interesting bits and emitting
the information required by the Lispy language to access or call the C++
part. As depending on Clang is not allowed, another tool is required,
but there are some, or the info can be generated once and put into a
file and then maintained as the C source code changes, altough the
problem with this approach are the platform-dependent bits.