[RFC] Re: translators to guile

[Lalo Martins <lalo at webcom dot com>]

What I'm actually interested in is:

How will translators generally work?

Will I just be able to open a standard Python file? How?

Or do I need to add something? What?

************************************

If this isn't settled on yet, I have my own suggestion/proposal:

1. (load-generic filename)
  This function would get ``filename'' trough an alist to find
  the correct translator. This would require each translator to
  register a loading function.

  Perhaps if the filename criterium fails, we can try a second
  alist with the first line of the file, or the results of
  `file filename` or something?

  Of course this sollution doesn't help a lot if people need to
  evaluate a string. But then again there are probably no means
  of finding out the language of a string, so an app that has
  lots of tiny bits of script has to find its own way to find
  out the language. Perhaps we could give them, just to be
  nice, two extra functions: (language-list) with the list of
  registered translators/reinterpreters, and
  (eval-with-language string language) which I hope is
  self-explanatory.

2. Reinterpreters
  This is what I do with Sonya, a module to read postfixed
  (currently FORTH, more or less) code. A script that uses a
  reinterpreter isn't properly a target language script, and
  yet it isn't exactly Scheme. All you have to do is add to the
  top of the script a "(language foobar" line and a ")" to the
  bottom. For example, a Sonya script with this system could be:

(language forth
  2 2 + =
  (Hello word!) =
)

  As ``language'' is a syntax, we know we shouldn't interpret
  parenthesis and other stuff inside. Do guile syntaxes know
  about leaving comments alone? (Because what is a comment for
  Guile may be a command for some other language)

[]s,
                                               |alo
                                               +----
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