I have no plans to work on this, but I am curious if this has been discussed or attempted...
Motivation: My job has been C# for many years and while C# is very appropriate for most of the problems I encounter at work, sometimes a problem comes along that makes me want more power. In those situations, I think the language I want is "C# except now it's S-expressions and it has Racket's macro system." And then I wonder if an alternate version of C# could be implemented this way: 1) Create a new grammar for what a fully-expanded C# AST is. This will be in terms of Racket syntax objects, just like Racket's definition of a Fully Expanded Program. 2) Write a compiler that generates CIL (the bytecode) given a fully-expanded C# AST. 3) Use Racket's #lang mechanism and macro system to implement the surface language. Now this new C# could borrow a lot of power from Racket, right? For example, I could make all of Racket available during expansion! Even if I don't want C#-the-surface-language to have macros at all, why shouldn't I keep the Racket-powered backdoor open? As long as you generate a valid C# AST, I should be able to compile it for you. The #lang mechanism and Scribble are two other nice things that could probably be adapted into the new C# if desired. I can understand why Microsoft wouldn't do this. But I've seen enough hobby languages, and I'm surprised that none of them do this. Reusing a backend (like dotnet or the JVM) is common, reusing a "frontend" is something I've never seen. Is Racket's macro system too specific to Racket's definition of a fully-expanded program? (The little bit I've done with local-expand and stop-ids makes me think it would work fine.) Is there something else that would make this approach more trouble than it's worth? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Racket Users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/racket-users/cc7c1792-ba59-400f-856a-3bb02a6096fbn%40googlegroups.com.
