Language implementation in Squeak (was Re: Python for Squeak)

Mark Guzdial guzdial at cc.gatech.edu
Wed Nov 17 15:17:24 UTC 1999


>
>Ian, can you give be a quick sense of how tricky it would be to get that
>stuff up in Squeak?
>

I actually just asked Ian this same question very recently (like last 
week!).  Our intro to programming class at Georgia Tech will probably 
move to Scheme next year, and I'd love to be able to provide them 
with a cross-platform Scheme implementation with collaboration 
support (MuSwiki, Telemorphic, new things...) built in.  So, getting 
Scheme into Squeak would be terrific.

But Ian said that his implementation relies on block closure 
semantics.  He also pointed out that his implementation didn't deal 
with the tough debugging issues, e.g., when you hit an error, you got 
dumped into the Smalltalk debugger with Smalltalk code appearing.

My current thinking is that, for our needs, building a Scheme 
interpreter and debugger might be easier than porting Ian's system. 
Ian's code provided a meta-level, with instantiations in CL and 
Scheme semantics/syntax.  I don't need that much flexibility -- I 
just need Scheme, but I need it to look like Scheme even when 
debugging.  Sussman and Abelson provide a simple Scheme interpreter 
-- I'm thinking about starting from that in Squeak and seeing where I 
can build up to.

But just thinking, mind you.  There are several other items on the 
to-do list yet...:-)

Mark

--------------------------
Mark Guzdial : Georgia Tech : College of Computing : Atlanta, GA 30332-0280
(404) 894-5618 : Fax (404) 894-0673 : guzdial at cc.gatech.edu
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/people/Faculty/Mark.Guzdial.html





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