On Mon, 21 Jun 2010 13:09:38 +0100
Anselm R Garbe <garbeam_AT_gmail.com> wrote:
> On 21 June 2010 06:09, Robert Ransom <rransom.8774_AT_gmail.com> wrote:
> > Scheme *should* be used for almost everything -- bootloaders, OS
> > kernels, hardware drivers, tiny user utilities (like (Plan 9) ls and
> > mc; Unix ls no longer qualifies as a tiny utility, and should not be
> > written at all), long-running servers, etc. -- everything but x86 boot
> > sectors should be written in Scheme.
>
> I think some dudes attempted this using Dylan
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dylan_(programming_language) a while ago
> in the BogkOS efforts, but it failed miserably, it was even worse than
> GNU turd.
Dylan is not Scheme -- they stuck an awful Algol-like syntax on it,
even if there is still some Lispiness at lower levels (I don't know
whether it's still a Lisp in its innards, and I don't care enough about
Dylan to go to any trouble to find out).
They probably didn't have a ‘sufficiently smart compiler’ for Dylan,
either. (To use the infamous phrase from the Common Lisp spec -- back
then, no one knew how to write such a compiler. Now, many pieces of
the problem have been ‘solved’; writing a good enough compiler for most
purposes is now a Simple Matter Of Programming.)
Robert Ransom
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