Re: How could this be implemented?

[Per Bothner]

Jon Wilson wrote:
> Per Bothner wrote:
> > You really have to treat ls as a macro, which is resolved at
> > compile-time.  Otherwise, it becomes near-impossible to
> > compile name-lookup efficiently.  And if you can't compile
> > it, it's a toy.
> Bash script is not compiled, but it is quite useful.  Not a toy at all.

You really don't want to do non-trivial programming in bash ...

Also, remember it's a different niche.  If you try to combine bash
and scheme, you might get something that sort-of-works but has
terrible performance, debugability, etc.

> So, what "that we can see" means is anything which eval is 
> already and normally able to resolve to some value.

The problem is you're killing lexical scoping.  You can no
longer tell statically if an identifier reference resolves to
a lexical binding.  This means the compiler has to be extra
conservative.  It makes harder for people to reason about the
program.  And it makes it harder for a compiler to issue useful
error messages.

These are features not to be easily given up.
--
        --Per Bothner
address@hidden   http://per.bothner.com/