🚀 go-pugleaf

This reminds me of an old idea from my days as a programming language
hacker: The minimal language kernel. The idea is to find the smallest
set of primitives from which all the elements of the interpreter
could be built. Then you build the interpreter itself out of just
those primitives.

In Forth, for example, one could code about 200 bytes of code, and
bootstrap in the rest of the language. For front-panel s-100 systems,
this was a dream come true, even though most of the boot code just
read and stored addresses.  I even recall some discussion about the
definition of a minimal common lisp kernel and verified add-on
packages, before common lisp turned into Ada. Pseudo-code is based on
a similar idea, where a high-level langauge compiler would generate
interpreted code.  UCSD Pascal compiler used p-code, Apple used
Sweet-16, etc.

I may be wrong, but it seems that for a summer project, one could
define postscript in a semantically cleaner, smaller, and lower-level
language with direct control of memory, which could then be
implemented for different platforms or in other languages like C or
lisp. The code for postscript would just be slurped in.  It would
certainly be less efficient than a hand-coded postscript, but it might
be publically extensible.

Comments? Volunteers? 

--
Jordan Pollack                            Assistant Professor
CIS Dept/OSU                              Laboratory for AI Research
2036 Neil Ave                             Email: pollack@cis.ohio-state.edu
Columbus, OH 43210                        Fax/Phone: (614) 292-4890