Kawa: Compiling Scheme to Java
1.0 Introduction
While Java is a decent programming language, its success
is largely due to using portable bytecodes, and its
integration into secure web browsers. Many prefer other
programming languages. If they are implemented on top of
Java, programmers can gain many of the extra-linguistic
benefits of Java, including libraries, portable bytecodes,
web applets, and the existing efforts to improve Java
implementations and tools.
Scheme is a simple yet powerful language. It is a
non-pure functional language (i.e. it has first-class
functions, lexical scoping, non-lazy evaluation, and side
effects). It has dynamic typing, and usually has an
interactive read-evaluate-print interface. The dynamic
nature of Scheme (run-time typing, immediate expression
evaluation) may be a better match for the dynamic Java
environment (interpreted bytecodes, dynamic loading) than
Java is!
Note: Kawa is also the trademarked name of a commercial Java
development environment. To avoid confusion, we may soon change
the name of the system described here, but in any case, information
and source code will be available
from `http://www.cygnus.com/~bothner/kawa.html'.
