New kid on the block / introduction

[Tom Novelli]

On 11/2/06, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky <znmeb at cesmail.net> wrote:
> Yep -- RetroForth, RevaForth and FreeForth/FASM. Right now I'm leaning
> towards the FreeForth/FASM, since ANS Forth compatibility isn't critical.

I'm not offended :-)

> Ruby is mostly a hybrid of Smalltalk and Perl. It has lambdas, blocks,
> closures and continuations, but not tail recursion, and there's quite a
> bit of debate in the core Ruby developer community about the future of
> continuations. Its connections with Lisp and Scheme are mostly through
> Smalltalk and not directly from the Lisp family. See
>
> http://borasky-research.blogspot.com/2006/10/rubyconf-2006-impending-ruby-fracture.html

I saw your wish list there... macros, tail recursion, continuations,
numeric arrays, assembler... I've been playing with the CMUCL/SBCL
Lisp compilers the past few weeks, and they do ALL that, seemingly
pretty well.  Couldn't you write a Ruby-to-Lisp parser?  If that
works, I think you could create a stripped-down version of SBCL, load
your parser, and save out a modest-size executable... and if it works
for Ruby, it ought to work for Python, Javascript, etc.. and they'd
all share the same garbage collector, native code compiler, etc.