🚀 go-pugleaf

>>Translating ksh93, perl5, or python into scheme will only slow them
>>down.  Why ever would you want to do this?
>
>Why do you think that?  Almost every Scheme interpreter I've tried outruns
>python, ksh, and perl on simple benchmarks like arithmetic and function 
>calling. 

Scheme and perl, for example, encourage very different styles of programming.
Perl programs tend not to be as function-call intensive as lispish programs.
So by switching to scheme, you gain a little bit on a little part of the
program, and lose out on things that perl is really good at.

There exists a translator from awk to perl (a2p).  I used it once, and the
translated version was somewhat slower.  Then I rewrote the program from 
scratch using perl idioms, and it ended up being 30% faster than the
awk implementation.  This kind of experience makes me leery of ideas that
rely on quality machine translation between languages.

A bigger problem, IMHO, is that a translated program is almost always
less readable than the program in its native language.

-Matt