goals of LispM, etc.

[Mike McDonald]

>From: hbaker@netcom.com (Henry G. Baker)
>Subject: Re: goals of LispM, etc.
>To: kem@franz.com (Kelly Murray)
>Date: Wed, 30 Apr 1997 13:07:56 -0700 (PDT)
>
>Re LispVM, native Lisp, etc.:

>I think that one piece of standards work that needs to happen
>relatively quickly is a standard mapping of C and C++ syntax into
>S-expressions, together with a parser and pretty-printer.  This solves
>several problems:
>
>* you get the ability to use Lisp as a preprocessor
>* you get the ability to read .h files to gather information
>* you automatically get a decent C/C++ pretty-printer !  :-) :-)
>
>It is probably also necessary to program the silly C preprocessor in
>Lisp in order to gain compatibility.  (Perhaps Dick Gabriel knows what
>became of all of Lucid's old code?)

  I kept scratching my head trying to figure out why you'd want to
take C syntax and convert it into lisp. Then Fare mentioned something
that finally made me understand you want just the opposite. You want a
lisp subset that could be used in place of C. You want LIL! (Or
something like it.) Then we could do all of that low level stand alone
code in our lisp subset and use all of the power of our lisp
developement tools on it, like macros. I get (finally!).

  Mike McDonald
  mikemac@engr.sgi.com