John Cowan wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 26, 2008 at 9:48 AM, Patrick Wright <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> interpretation vs. compilation in Kawa.
>
> According to the docs, Kawa's REPL has a hybrid strategy, with simple
> expressions (literals, references to global variables, assignments,
> and function calls -- anything that doesn't bind new lexical
> variables) being interpreted and everything else compiled.
>
> However, the version in svn has now switched to compiling everything,
> for the sake of greater consistency and better exception traces.
Interestingly, Kawa still needs an interpreter, but it is now just
used for macro expansion. In theory, one could have the compiler
compile the macro definitions first, and then invoke them as needed
at compile time. However, that seems difficult, especially for
Scheme forms like let-syntax, where the macro definition is
lexically local to some other expression.
So ironically, now that Kawa uses the interpreter less, it is
more complete (in the sense of supporting most of Scheme) than
it was in the old days (pre-2006, when let-syntax support was
much improved).
--
--Per Bothner
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://per.bothner.com/
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