Re: [bootstrappable] Re: wip-full-source-bootstrap: from a 357-byte `hex0' to 'hello'

[jeremiah@pdp10.guru]

>> I think that's what mes-m2 rewrite [1] (not to be confused with mes wip-m2 branch)
>> is trying to achieve.
> Oh I see.  It’s still kinda confusing to have two Mes.  Wouldn’t it be
> nice to have just one?
yes it would.

Which is why a third scheme is being written in the Haskell subset we
are bootstrapping.

Ironically time from M2-Planet to Haskell was just a couple of weeks of work.

but M2-Planet to scheme is a bit of a pain point, as janneke and I seem
to have very different styles for scheme in C.

But that might simply because I spent the last 4 years dealing with hex
and assembly and my scheme code is now crap.

> I understand the goals are not exactly the same,
> but is there some way to converge?  (This is a naive question, you’ve
> probably already thought about it, but anyways.  :-))
There are 3 easy ways to converge the two.

1) transplant janneke's wip-m2 eval into mes-m2 to solve the mes-m2
macro problem enough to run MesCC (but might make guile compatibility harder).

2) transplant my mes-m2's garbage collector into wip-m2 to solve the wip-m2
pointer arithmetic problem (but is even farther from guile compatibilty).

3) not actually converge the code and simply throw one or both of them
away. Say write the whole thing in a better language than C (haskell
perhaps but ultimately requires abandoning previous work).

I wish I had better answers but we still have guile's psyntax.pp
bootstrapping problem and figuring out how to do syntax-case in C is a
b**** of a problem; not even having to deal with the do this with a
minimal C compiler restrictions involved.

If we pulled the scheme macro requirement out, then the number of
minimal schemes which could run MesCC would explode.

But it seems unlikely such a change would occur as macro-less scheme is
no more productive than standard C coding.

- Jeremiah