Re: [Jscheme-user] guile's quasi string approach

[Ken A. <kan...@bb...>]

I think the idea that JScheme is an alternative "skin" for java programs is an important one, and your idea of allowing alternative languages to provide java behavior by using JScheme as a back end is a good one.

We could support multiple syntax by allowing a customizable #macro, or as Common Lisp did, allow a customizable (read) so you could change its read-table.

After TCL/TK came out Stallman i believe criticized it for being a bad scripting language, because string hacking was everywhere, especially in the inner loop. 
He said something like "translate TCL into Scheme and win big".  I believe the outcome was that the people who tried to translate TCL into Scheme had to make semantic changes to TCL for things to work out, much as PLT Scheme needs changes to Python for their analysis to be userful.  I'm sure that the amount of effort provided from the Scheme side to the other language was substantial.

Eventually, someone wrote a TCL "compiler" that ran at about as well as the Scheme implementation.  Which just proves that bad ideas will continue to win as long as someone is willing to put more effort into them.

While you can translate the code into Scheme, its harder to translate the error messages.  Why am i getting a JScheme and Java backtracke when i'm talking to prolog?  We can hide this to some extent, but to provide "good" language specific runtime error message may be hard.  Of course, the JScheme attitude should be, that that doesn't make it worth trying!  JScheme - you can get a lot more than you might expect from a little language.