Re: other languages supported by kawa

[Per Bothner <per at bothner dot com>]

Marco Vezzoli <marco.vezzoli@st.com> writes:

> One of the goals of kawa seems to be to provide an environment for
> language porting into java platform; I would like to know if some
> laguages are suitable for that porting: 
> a)ECMAscripts (Javascript JScript etc)
> b)Haskell
> c)Prolog
> 
> The first seems to have been planned into the original project,

Well, it wasn't planned in the "orginal project".  However, I did spend
some time trying to understand the ECMAScript standard, and starting
to implement it, but I didn't get far enough to produce anything useful.
I don't know of any inherent problems using Kawa to compile ECMAscript
to bytecode.

> the third maybe has some implementation written in a portable Scheme.

There are two complications implementing Prolog:
(1) call-by-unification, and
(2) backtracking.
call-by-unification can be implemented without fundamental problems,
I think:  Just add a logic variable data type.  Backtracking is
harder.  The obvious approach is to use call/cc - which Kawa does
not fully support.

Another approach is to simulate the WAM in Java,

> The second [Haskell] is maybe more difficoult to achieve but IMHO is
> a really exciting environment for functional programming.

Yep.  However, I myself have very little feel for how best to
implement non-eager evaluation.
-- 
	--Per Bothner
per@bothner.com   http://www.bothner.com/~per/