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dylan-hackers / mindy

Mindy - minimal compiler-interpreter for Dylan
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s-expression syntax? #54

Open waywardmonkeys opened 8 years ago

waywardmonkeys commented 8 years ago

This comes up in many (many) Dylan discussions.

Should we have an s-expression syntax?

waywardmonkeys commented 8 years ago

I've been discussing this with @lojikil ... I'm open to someone (him?) doing a prototype in this direction.

An open question remains "What exactly should the s-expressions look like?" ... I'm fairly open on this. I think they should try to look like the original s-expression syntax from the early Apple Dylan days where possible, but I recognize that this isn't fully possible due to things like adjectives (define-method vs define sealed method).

I have some old notes on various syntax options here:

https://github.com/waywardmonkeys/prefixy-dylan-notes/blob/master/source/index.rst

waywardmonkeys commented 8 years ago

If this were to happen, it wouldn't replace the existing syntax but be a separate surface syntax.

lojikil commented 8 years ago

Should we integrate what Marlais or some other S-Expression based Dylan does, and then decide what else we might want this to look like? Would be nice to have some existing body of code to use...

lojikil commented 8 years ago

And I'm definitely open to converting yous to using proper, S-Expression syntaxed Dylan, like God intended...

/me runs away

waywardmonkeys commented 8 years ago

There's no code to be salvaged from Marlais. (The licensing is one big reason, but Marlais was also pretty incomplete and the s-expression code was removed and I don't know where the reader was.)

@wvdschel is poking at writing an s-expression reader in C. I know you have several. :)