Re: scripting with bonobo

[Miguel de Icaza <miguel helixcode com>]

> Now, to
> support your favorite scripting language, *all* you have to do is write
> a translator Perl->Scheme, Python->Scheme etc. However, this is
> non-trivial (to say the least). There have been some attempts at
> translators (tcl, javascript, ctax), but I don't think these are
> 'production quality'. 

I do not think that anyone serious considers this approach possible.
The whole idea of translating languages into scheme and interpreting
them comes from a Usenix paper on programming languages that compared
Tcl vs Tcl translated-to-Scheme and proved that scheme was faster.

Anonymous sources have reported that some of the values presented in
the paper (I do forget the exact details about which other languages
they compared) were bogus and someone who attended the presentation of
the paper told me that the paper made some claims that were not that
true.

Anyways, this paper was instrumental into convincing Richard of the
possibility of having a single scripting language and writing
translators on top of it.  Many clueed people claim it was never a
great idea.

Miguel.