Squeak)
To: squeak at cs.uiuc.edu

Mark Guzdial <guzdial at cc.gatech.edu> wrote:

> 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.

If you haven't already, you might want to take a look at Christian
Queinnec's book, Lisp in Small Pieces, which discusses a lot of the
issues Scheme implementors encounter in excruciating theoretical detail.
 He builds a series of interpreters to illustrate the issues, most of
them in his own single-inheritance OO system, called MEROON.  He made me
laugh in the chapter on continuations, where he writes, "Notice that the
entire interpreter could easily be written in a real object-language,
like Smalltalk, so we could take advantage of its famous browser and
debugger.  The only thing left to do is to add whatever is needed to
open a lot of little windows everywhere."