> Is the lazyness actually beneficial? I do not have knowledge of the internals of boot, which was designed and written entirely by Dick Jenks and Bill Burge. There were many parsers for Axiom and this was a research area for Bill. I suspect that the DELAY you see in the zipper parser was just another research experiment, not related to the delay in recent languages in any way.
Frankly I believe the whole thing should be rewritten using the syntax and semantics of Aldor but implemented in lisp, following the original scratchpad project plan. The C based version can never reach into the axiom algebra tree where the real value of axiom lies. Most of the functionality of Aldor already exists. A cleanly designed and implemented parser would go a long way toward making the project a stronger research platform, both for language and for algebra. We could remove all of boot and its complications and have a clearly specified AST layer that users could access. Indeed, done properly and carefully documented a new parser would allow an algebra file to define its own input syntax, similar to it's ability to define its own output syntax. Thus a quantum physics user could implement the "bra" and "ket" operators, handle greek letters, etc. But I think a parser rewrite waits on the language definition. I don't think it would benefit us to be overly religious about the language points at this time. It would be more important to be able to parse what exists cleanly and make the parser extensible from algebra. Lisp gives us the unique ability to manipulate the intermediate language forms in the same implementation language. Thus the "overhead" of letting algebra introduce new syntax is minimal since even the console readtables can be changed on the fly. Tim _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer
