Lambda the Ultimate

(via comp.lang.scheme)

Erick Gallesio and Manuel Serrano have announced the release of version 1.2b of Skribe, a document processing language based on Scheme. From the home page:

Skribe is a text processor. Even [though] it is a general purpose tool, it best suits the writing of technical documents such as web pages or technical reports, API documentations, etc. At first glance, Skribe looks like a mark-up language à la HTML. So, there is no need to have developed computer programming skills to use Skribe.

A second look reveals that Skribe is actually a true programming language, provided with high level features (such as objects, higher order functions, regular and syntactic parsing, etc.). Skribe is based on the Scheme programming language.

From Skribe source files it is possible to produce various targets:

• HTML pages that can be used to implement a web site (such as the Skribe Home Page).
• XML files.
• LaTeX files that can be used to produce high quality Postscript or PDF files.

What language enthusiast/researcher hasn't chafed at the language design of TeX? You should especially check out some of their cool examples.

CIL - Infrastructure for C Program Analysis and Transformation

CIL (C Intermediate Language) is a high-level representation along with a set of tools that permit easy analysis and source-to-source transformation of C programs. [...] The main advantage of CIL is that it compiles all valid C programs into a few core constructs with a very clean semantics. Also CIL has a syntax-directed type system that makes it easy to analyze and manipulate C programs. Furthermore, the CIL front-end is able to process not only ANSI-C programs but also those using Microsoft C or GNU C extensions.

And the interesting part:

CIL has been tested very extensively. It is able to process the SPECINT95 benchmarks, the Linux kernel, GIMP and other open-source projects.

Maybe, in the future, we will need to write C by hand only very rarely, by using higher-level languages that compile to C. Not only that, but we may be able to maintain the legacy C code using higher-level languages. How about that ? :)