Interpreter vs compiler



>I have thought about always translating Maxima's input into Lisp and
>then running the Lisp code, instead of interpreting the internal s-expr
>representation.  If the translation is done correctly, we could have
>lexical scope by default.  And since the code is Lisp, a Lisp compiler
>could be used to make things go faster.  And that would allow things
>currently in Lisp to be moved to Maxima if desired.
>
>This could also clean up some semantics because we would use Lisp
>semantics for the most part.
>
>I don't know if this is feasible, but having more stuff in Maxima and
>less in Lisp sounds like a good idea to me.
>
>Ray
>  
>
I have thought about this too. Unfortunately currently the translated 
code sometimes calls
the interpreter. E.g for  f(x):=ev(x). This would have to be replaced by 
code
that first translates the argument to ev and then executes it.  This  
does not
seem entirely unfeasible....

Michel