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Re: Translators again
On Sat, Jan 22, 2000 at 11:02:46PM +0000, Neil Jerram wrote:
> Lalo Martins writes:
>
> > Is the ``client'' application responsible to finding out the
> > language, or is it Guile (libguile)? [...]
> >
> > This is a detail, IMO. We can implement any reasonable combination of
> > - client specification
> > - looking at file extensions
> > - simple source code analysis.
>
> It's an important detail. Try to design an application that
> supports translation without knowing this detail and you'll
> see. :-)
>
> Sure - sorry, I didn't mean to belittle your point. I think that it's
> a fundamental problem, but one that we can solve acceptably in
> practice.
>
> Still, I think you give the best answer. I'd futher boil it to:
>
> 1: the client chooses the language, but it can choose ``detect''
>
> 2: the detector first tries to search for a string in the first
> few lines (bytes?).
>
> 3: if that fails, it looks at the filename suffix (extension).
>
> 4: if even that fails, should it issue an error (exception) or
> return ``scheme''?
>
> Sounds good. In my proposal, you could implement this sort of
> strategy by
>
> - defaulting to <autodetect-reader> (rather than
> <scm-reader>) if no reader class is specified
>
> - writing an <autodetect-reader> implementation that performs
> the steps above and then instantiates the appropriate
> <LANG-reader> as a proxy to slurp the source file.
Oh. And what about ``eval''? The situation where I want to
execute a string of user input? Remember that Guile is also for
extension :-)
[]s,
|alo
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