[plt-scheme] Generating Java source from Scheme

On Tue, Jan 6, 2009 at 9:22 PM, Grant Rettke <grettke at acm.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 6, 2009 at 7:02 PM, Shriram Krishnamurthi <sk at cs.brown.edu> wrote:
>> Danny Yoo has a reasonable Scheme -> J2ME compiler for the Beginning
>> Student + WORLD subset of Scheme.  Would that be of interest?  Is that
>> something others would be interested in contributing to?
>
> That is interesting. For what are you looking for others to contribute?

There is a large set of primitive functions even in Beginner Scheme.
Many of these are pretty straightforward to translate to Java, but
someone still needs to do the translation by hand, to account for
subtle differences in semantics.  It's not the most exciting thing in
the world, but it is easy to dive in and help with (because we've
already got several translated, so you have examples to help you).

We are currently also wrestling with the differences between J2ME,
which most non-dumb cell phones now support, and the Android platform,
which has its own libraries for the same tasks.  (I'm ignoring the
iPhone because I, personally, don't have one; but if someone who does
have one is interested in scripting that, that would be yet another
platform to throw into this mix.)  We need to figure out some form of
bridge/adapter between these.  We have just begun to investigate some
Open projects that purport to do this, but we don't yet know their
state of affairs.  This is something where expertise would be even
more valuable than coding cycles (eg, "use bridge project X for
graphics, project Y for HTTP, and don't touch project Z").

Shriram