Martin,
What possible advantage would it be to have the interpreter in Spad?
Assuming you want to move away from Lisp you would also have to
code the compiler in Spad.
Spad is just a domain specific language on top of Lisp. It is useful
for the target domain (mathematics) but not particularly interesting
as a general-purpose language.
Furthermore, the Spad compiler/interpreter relies on certain features
of Lisp that are not part of the Spad language (e.g. dynamically
constructed closures).
As for the boot code, the only existing manual is online at
Boot defeats the use of the full power of Common Lisp.
It would have been useful to use things like defstructs to create
and manipulate data structures rather than raw lists. But using
Boot makes that lie outside the needed mental model and rather
awkward to code.
I understand that Lisp is an epiphany language (i.e. you hate it until
you "get it" and then you love it) but it does have its advantages.
For me, in Axiom, the one key advantage is that there are about 3-ish
people that speak Boot and 300+ people who speak Lisp. So just by