This is definitely an interesting project, as writing an interpreter teaches you a lot about how languages work. However, it seems almost like it's going in the wrong direction. Scheme is a pile of planks and nails, and to get any use of it you have to pound them into a language. Perl, on the other hand, is all sorts of nifty wooden doohickeys designed for common tasks. So your book is doing something like showing how to make boards out of furniture.

It would probably be more useful to write an interpreter or translator that started with all of the built-ins that Perl already has, and added something more. Two examples that come to mind are MJD's Linogram for line drawings, and PDL's PDL::PP, for fast matrix operations. Learning how to extend Perl into other domains and integrate these extensions into the language would both supply interpreter-fu and be extremely useful.

But anyways, I'm just sittin' in the peanut gallery, so who am I to say?

In reply to Re: RFC: Almost a Book by educated_foo
in thread RFC: Almost a Book by billh

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