Martin, What possible advantage would it be to have the interpreter in Spad?
Assuming you want to move away from Lisp you would also have to code the compiler in Spad. Spad is just a domain specific language on top of Lisp. It is useful for the target domain (mathematics) but not particularly interesting as a general-purpose language. Furthermore, the Spad compiler/interpreter relies on certain features of Lisp that are not part of the Spad language (e.g. dynamically constructed closures). As for the boot code, the only existing manual is online at http://daly.axiom-developer.org/boot.tgz Boot defeats the use of the full power of Common Lisp. It would have been useful to use things like defstructs to create and manipulate data structures rather than raw lists. But using Boot makes that lie outside the needed mental model and rather awkward to code. I understand that Lisp is an epiphany language (i.e. you hate it until you "get it" and then you love it) but it does have its advantages. For me, in Axiom, the one key advantage is that there are about 3-ish people that speak Boot and 300+ people who speak Lisp. So just by considering the long term existence of Axiom it pays to go with a language people speak. Tim
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