minipascal

> Speedwise the 1MHz 6502 and 4MHz Z80 were on par. This is a bit of an exaggeration, the 6502 was efficient but not that efficient. While generally understood that the Z80 took 2x-4x ticks to execute instructions as the 6502, in the real world its larger register set meant properly-written Z80 code could avoid expensive, slow round trips to memory. Outside of artificial benchmarks real world performance shows that the 6502 is roughly 2x as efficient per clock cycle as the Z80[0], i.e. a 1 MHz 6502 is approximately equivalent to a 2 Mhz Z80. This is reflected in the computers of the day, i.e. TRS-80s were not being blown out of the water by Commodore PETs. [0] https://github.com/soegaard/minipascal/blob/master/minipasca...

Lisps let you define macros. Racket lets you define languages. https://docs.racket-lang.org/guide/languages.html https://docs.racket-lang.org/guide/more-hash-lang.html Example of a language-in-racket: https://github.com/soegaard/minipascal/tree/master

> Eventually I'll probably implement a Pascal layer on top of Racket. https://github.com/soegaard/minipascal

I'd say most are racket variants - and that makes sense - the scribble lang (for documentation/documents) is a prime example of that kind of "tool" DSL, and "lazy" (as mentioned by another commenter) is another. https://docs.racket-lang.org/scribble/getting-started.html But there's also stuff like: http://docs.racket-lang.org/sweet/index.html And after a quick Google I found: https://github.com/soegaard/minipascal And there are of course things like: https://docs.racket-lang.org/datalog/datalog.html But I suppose that qualifiés as "lisp like"... [ed: and the article mentions "brag" which I think would be odd to call "lisp like" : https://docs.racket-lang.org/datalog/datalog.html ]

For comparison, a Pascal compiler in Racket: https://github.com/soegaard/minipascal

This one is nice and clean: https://github.com/soegaard/minipascal

I have a compile-to-Racket implementation of a Pascal subset here: https://github.com/soegaard/minipascal There are two versions. The first one https://github.com/soegaard/minipascal/blob/master/minipascal/compiler-simple.rkt is without typechecking. The second one adds a type checker: https://github.com/soegaard/minipascal/blob/master/minipasca...

OK, so I'm looking at https://github.com/soegaard/minipascal right now, and ok it looks like there's a couple thousand lines of racket code that will translate a very limited (no records, no reals, does not appear to be any pointers) pascal-like language. So presumably for this to be exciting, it would have to be executing in a larger environment where it's surrounded by racket code doing its own thing. But now I don't see what's so special about that, and why that's different from, say, a python script that takes a string of fake-pascal, turns it into python thru an internal processor, and then calls an eval.

Firstly, Racket is not a Scheme. There are reader macros and all that bells and whistles. Does this look like S-expressions to you? https://github.com/soegaard/minipascal Secondly, even most Schemes allow to use [ ] and { } in addition to ( ).

As sklogic said, no need to learn Racket: It has multiple Lipsy dialects: http://docs.racket-lang.org/guide/dialects.html And a datalog one: http://docs.racket-lang.org/datalog/index.html It knows C: http://pkg-build.racket-lang.org/doc/c/index.html And Javascript: https://github.com/lwhjp/ecmascript And Algol: http://docs.racket-lang.org/algol60/index.html And Pascal: https://github.com/soegaard/minipascal It shouldn't be too difficult to teach it Lua ;).

If anyone is interested in seeing how the principles in the article can be used to implement a traditional language, I offer MiniPascal. https://github.com/soegaard/minipascal The reader (lexer and parser) turns the source program into syntax objects. The main idea is to make a Racket macro for each Pascal construct. The Racket macro expands into normal Racket. https://github.com/soegaard/minipascal/blob/master/minipasca...