> I'm trying to build a substrate that people can fork off for new languages
I sense a common (albeit very general) theme with Readwarp. :)
> As I go over arc's functions and macros, I see a few things that just macros won't fix: if and cond treat () as false; if, + and map can take any number of args; car and cdr don't barf on (); let needs fewer parens and can handle destructuring more transparently. In these cases I plan to make it easy to just replace if with my-if in the transform phase.
Must be misunderstanding you here. I thought most of these (esp. 'nil and '() both being false, those utilities taking any number of args) were well-publicized features of Arc, not bugs. Were you perhaps referring to PLT's functions, or could you otherwise clarify please?
> I often programmed with my program in a window on one side and arc.arc open in a window next to it.
I love doing this.
Definitely an interesting project. I'm glad you decided to share about it here and sorry for not providing richer feedback on the actual idea in this comment.
> "I thought most of these (esp. 'nil and '() both being false, those utilities taking any number of args) were well-publicized features of Arc, not bugs."
Yeah each of these is absolutely an improvement. I meant that these are the reasons arc needs to be a language with a compiler rather than a macro library. So they're the parts that are challenging to reimplement without building a monolithic cond.
