🚀 go-pugleaf

tmb@arolla.idiap.ch (Thomas M. Breuel) writes:

>   My primary interest in functional languages is not ease of programming
>   from a human viewpoint (after all, adding imperative features to a
>   pure FL will not make programming in it harder), but the ease of
>   manipulating programs.
>
>Too bad that languages like SML (and, moreso, Haskell) have adopted
>such a comparatively complex syntax. Writing programs to manipulate
>programs is much easier in Lisp, due to the obvious correspondence
>between external and internal representation and a standard interface
>to the compiler/type facilities (in the form of macros and type
>predicates).

All you need is a parser which translates the concrete syntax to the abstract
syntax (i.e., Lisp-like notation), and an "unparser" to translate back.  This
way the user gets the benefit of being able to write readable code and the
rewrite engine doesn't have to parse anything.  This approach works very well
for the transformation system on which I'm working (Uday Reddy's Focus system).

Rob