guile support for multiple languages [was: [PATCH] add language/wisp to Guile?]

[Matt Wette <matt.wette@gmail.com>]

On 10/2/23 7:59 AM, Christine Lemmer-Webber wrote:
> "Philip McGrath" <philip@philipmcgrath.com> writes:
>
>> I've sort of alluded above to my pipe dream of a grand unified future
>> for Racket-and-Guile-on-Chez, Guile-and-Racket-on-the-Guile-VM, and
>> endless other possibilities. I wrote about it in more detail on the
>> guix-devel list at [10]. (These thoughts were inspired by
>> conversations with Christine Lemmer-Webber, though she bears no
>> responsibility for my zany imaginings.)
> It's a long email so I'm only quoting the part that mentions me.  ;)
>
> In general I think the hash-lang idea in Racket is a neat one.  File
> extensions are also possible I suppose, but ultimately, when the program
> boots, there has to be some sort of way of finding the "current
> configuration" of languages.
>
> Note that #langs have an ambient authority problem, if we had a more
> ocap'y system, but... we're far from that, any module can do a mess of
> things, so I suppose if we're relying on the module system with ambient
> authority already, the same situation may apply.
>
> One thing that's worth noting is that languages do *two things* (or
> three): they provide a reader, and they provide an execution model
> (including an initial set of bindings).  It would be nice if we could
> separate those two things as much as possible, when it is possible.
> I think readers are the least interesting part of language design
> usually.  But obviously I support Wisp here, so... ;)
>
>   - Christine

Maybe I missed something, but I believe guile does separate these.
Languages are supported with the "spec.scm" files in which are
specified #:reader, #:evaluator and #:make-default-environment.

Matt