Using Kawa to port Perl to the JVM

["Bradley M. Kuhn" <bkuhn at ebb dot org>]

I have just begun work to try to use Kawa to port Perl to the JVM.

It's clear that I can use gnu.bytecode.* directly, but this does not seem
much of an improvement over what I was doing.

Perl5 has its own intermediate representation, which is specific to the perl
implementation itself.  Earlier, I had been simply emitting Jasmin assembler
from this parse tree, which was quite tedious.

I'd like to somehow use a walk of the perl intermediate representation to
generate Kawa's intermediate representation.  My hope is that eventually
Perl can have the ability to call Scheme via Kawa.  I'd also like to
eventually integrate Perl with Jemacs.

Thus, I'd like to reuse much of what is in gnu.expr.* in some way.  However,
I am not sure what is reusable.  Some things seem pretty general, but a lot
of it seems specific to Lisp-like languages.

Do you all (and, in particular, Per :) have an suggestions on what parts of
gnu.expr.* I should look at reusing?

I started by thinking I should just begin subclassing Expression, creating
my own Perl expressions.  However, at first glance, I got concerned that the
Compilation class is so Scheme-specific, and that subclassing it wouldn't
work for Perl.

Am I looking in the wrong direction?  If so, can someone point me in the
right direction?

-- 
Bradley M. Kuhn  -  http://www.ebb.org/bkuhn

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