[Aldor-l] [Axiom-developer] Re: exports and constants

[Ralf Hemmecke]

> I might mention that the lisp output would be significantly easier
> to parse and maintain.

Are you saying that aldor should not be translated to C or Fortran or 
whatever other target there will be in the future?

I have no access to the LISP output at runtime of my program.

 > Language manipulation and transformation is
> the easiest thing to do in lisp (due to the fact that data and
> program have the same syntax). Lisp's READ function is straightforward.
> You could cover the reader with a complete Aldor package that could
> extract any known piece of information on request (e.g. fetchSignatures).
> Thus creating a complete reflection API only involves knowing the 
> structure of the data in the output file.

So what does that mean? If I want to use reflection for domains defined 
in libaldor. I would expect that

#include "aldor"
#include "aldorio"
import from Reflection;
l: List String := exports(PrimitiveType);
stdout << l << newline;

just prints something like

list(=, ~=);

How do you think that program would be compiled if there is some lisp 
stuff involved? Note that this is a standalone program.

Ralf