[racket] Fundamentals

On Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 07:36:54PM -0500, Mathew Kurian wrote:
> Thank you Professor Brown name for your reply as well.
> 
> When I read your reply, does your answer to the first question identify
> Racket as a language built on top of another base language (i.e. Assembly or
> C) or is it directly connected to the processor language?

First, I'll answer for Scheme.  There are a lot of Scheme 
implmentations.  If you want one build directly on C, I suggest you look 
at Gambit.  Gambit compiles Scheme to C (or optionally C++).  The Gambit 
interpreter is written in Scheme and translated to C by the compiler.

Next, Racket.

I'm not entirely sure of Racket (formerly PLT Scheme), but I believe it 
translates the input form of programs into a byte-code, and either 
interprets or cmopiles the byte-code to machine language, depending on 
how much effort has been exerted implementing the low-level stuff on 
your particular machine.  I believe that on 32-bit Intel machines, it 
gets compiled to machine code.  Can someone confirm this?

-- hendrik