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2 points by nostrademons 6162 days ago | link | parent

You wanna try a port? One of the examples for Yapps is a Lisp reader (http://theory.stanford.edu/~amitp/yapps/yapps2/manual/node2....), and once you've done the reader building an evaluator is standard Lisp stuff. Arc data types map very closely to standard Python types, and Python can do introspection on stack frames with the inspect module, though I don't think you could handle the scope chain using object prototypes like I did in ArcLite (though maybe with a bit of metaclass/getattr hacker...) You've got both the Arc and ArcLite source code to refer back to.

I was kinda curious what a Python port would look like - a lot of the boilerplate in ArcLite is dealing with language issues that Python has solved, like the lack of list comprehensions or decent string methods. But I couldn't justify spending any more time on it. It'd be neat to see the line counts of Scheme, Python, and JavaScript versions all together.



1 point by zmei_goryn 6162 days ago | link

Sorry for misunderstanding! My heretic idea is that given the arc goals we should not improve scheme or lisp but instead improve python given the evidence in benchmarks!

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4 points by nostrademons 6162 days ago | link

Well, as a Python programmer, I'd be all for that...

However, I don't think that's really Arc's goals, which I think were foremost to create a language that PG would like to program in. If he wanted to program in Python, he would. Also, the existing Arc community seems largely drawn from disenchanted Lispers who really like the syntax and macros of Lisp, but don't want to deal with onions in the existing languages.

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1 point by shiro 6161 days ago | link

If you use succinctness as the only metric, I wonder how well J performs.

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