Re: [Axiom-developer] Re: OpenAxiom-1.2.1 released

[Gabriel Dos Reis]

On Sat, Apr 11, 2009 at 12:26 AM, Scott Morrison
<address@hidden> wrote:
> As Dick Jenks explained it to me when I joined the Axiom project in 1984,
> the Boot language was intended as a boot-strap step to eventually implement
> the entire system in the Spad language.  The idea was first to convert to a
> language that was syntactically similar to Spad, then convert it to actually
> use Spad.  Of course the second step never happened.  That's why the
> language was named Boot.
> While Boot does have the semantics of Lisp, to me, the distinguishing
> feature is it's very nice syntax for list pattern matching.  You can do the
> same things in Lisp, but the syntactic elegance of Boot for pattern matching
> is undeniable.  It was so nice that we got away without real structured data
> throughout the entire project.  I love the syntax:

I couldn't agree more.   I think Boot was a real master piece --
just look at the size of the parser and translator.  Yes, definitely
the pattern matching syntax is really nice.

-- Gaby