seen in nyc

Pete Norvig found some old Dylan code for converting lisp to Dylan [via lambda the ultimate].

...here I produce Dylan code with nice indentation, to any specified column width, just by converting Lisp to a parse-tree syntax that is equivalent to Dylan, and then writing pretty-print directives for the parse-trees. All the rest is handled automatically.

As I told swm, haahr, and jrb, finding this old code made me feel like Dorothy waking up from her dream: “And you were in it, and you, and you. Some of it was beautiful, but most of it ...” well, most of it didn't turn out the way we hoped back in 1994-95.

The section on conversion pitfalls is interesting, even if it's just to put the code in a historical context (“we are waiting for the procedural macros to be defined”, the location of sin and cos wasn't yet specified).

Then, via dnm, is the news that Zeta-C, Scott Burson's C-to-Lisp translator/compiler for lisp machines, is now public domain.