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[Christopher J. Vogt]

At 2:00 PM -0500 5/3/97, Paul Prescod wrote:
>Jordan Henderson wrote:
>> One other project that might be started would be a C->Lisp compiler
>> project.  Here are a few goals I think might be beneficial for this
>> project.
>
>Ugh. My gut feeling is that this code is going to be slow. C's execution
>model is very different from Lisp's, and constructs that run quickly on
>C will run slowly on Lisp and vice versa. If you radically change the
>code so that it is optimized for Lisp compilation then it will become
>unmaintable. Even if you DON'T change the code it will probably be a
>pain to maintain because it will not be idiomatic C code.
>
>It seems much easier to me to just implement a C++ compiler on LispOS.
>On any modern processor the C/C++ program can be firewalled from the
>Java stuff and the operating system can be emulated through a set of
>exported APIs. Those APIs must be exported regardless of whether you
>convert to Lisp or compile directly from C++ to binary.

I agree that you don't want c->lisp translator.  I would also add that I
think you *do* want to C compiler to generate some Lisp like code.  For
instance, Maybe it should generate code to do bounds checking, like lisp
does.  Maybe the data should be typed, just like lisp, and garbage
collected.  Maybe this could be a compiler switch.  Maybe, just maybe, some
C hackers might find our LispM an interesting platform to code for.

[...]

Christopher (Chris) J. Vogt
mailto:vogt@novia.net
Omaha, NE
http://www.novia.net/~vogt/