Lisp to C. Another request!

[Geoff Clemm]

In article <3959 at pt.cs.cmu.edu> lxa at speech2.cs.cmu.edu (Francois Lecouat) writes:
>A friend of mine is looking for a translator from Lisp to C. Ideally it would
>read CommonLisp but if necessary the code could be ported to another Lisp
>first. 
>Jean-Marc Pageot posted a similar request recently.

Come on folks ... get serious.

If you are interested in non-trivial Lisp programs, there is no such thing
as a Lisp to C translator, and never will be.

The best you can do is find one of the lisp systems that are written in C,
and bundle that with your Lisp program.  Some systems "compile" the Lisp
into a more efficient form, and allow a stripped-down runtime version of
the Lisp interpreter, but you can't get away from garbage collection and
the need to be able to interpret functions generated at runtime.

On the other hand, if your Lisp programs are trivial enough to fit conveniently
into the C model, then writing a translator is equally trivial.

Geoff Clemm