[plt-dev] #lang: the stake in Dracula's heart?

On Feb  1, Carl Eastlund wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 1, 2010 at 1:02 PM, Matthew Flatt <mflatt at cs.utah.edu> wrote:
> 
> > Finally, I'm not sure how a file extension would get mapped to
> > "planet cce/acl2". But maybe all of that could be worked out.
> 
> Presumably the same way `#reader(planet "reader.ss" ("cce"
> "dracula.plt" 8 0) "modular" "lang")' gets translated to the
> "Modular ACL2" language level currently.  The language level tool
> must register itself and its identifying metadata.

That's something that exists only in DrScheme now.  Moving it to a
higher level seems dangerous to me, since it means that the meaning of
files depends on stuff in my own preference file.  Using "lisp" as the
ACL2 extension is good example for that -- since it'll get in the way
of a different lisp language implementation.  If there is such a
language, how would I be able to use both?

Another bad option that I mentioned in the past is to do what emacs is
doing -- define some magic that can appear anywhere on the line.  With
Emacs, you can write

  <anything> -*- scheme -*- <anything>

But this seems fine only with the heuristic-based stuff that Emacs is
doing (which in most cases doesn't affect the semantics since it's
"just" an editor...).

One concrete suggestion that would be easy to work with now is
something like (using r6rs as an example):

  #lang indirect "foo.scm" r6rs

which would make the reader parse "foo.scm" using the r6rs syntax.
To make it a little more convenient to use, DrScheme could have some
special treatment of such a language -- like presenting you with a
buffer that has

   #lang r6rs
   ...the contents of "foo.scm"...

with a different color for the #lang line or something like that.
This is still inconvnient in the sense that it requires an actual file
to work, but there's probably some way to go around this, like

  #lang indirect STDIN r6rs

or something.

Using something like that I can imagine extending mzscheme with a
command line flag for the module to run.  Something like:

  mzscheme --program '#lang scheme (+ 1 2)'

might work nicely -- and assuming that, you can finally do

  mzscheme --program '#lang indirect "file.scm" r6rs' file.scm

which could then be sugared into some

  mzscheme --program-language r6rs file.scm


-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
                    http://barzilay.org/                   Maze is Life!