Lambda the Ultimate

if one had to pick one language to write a program that would then be translated into any other language at random, what would be the best language to pick.
(obviously not all conversions could be done efficiently !)

Obviously as a c++ programmer i'm asking this with various dividing lines in mind.. pure vs impure functional, garbage-collection vs manual, static vs dynamic types.

maybe the question is nonsensical but i'm sure this forum will have interesting insights. :)

My doctoral dissertation is now publicly accessible at
http://www.archive.org/details/TheoreticalFoundationsForPracticaltotallyFunctionalProgramming

I believe it may be of interest to many here.

For those with an interest in the lambda-calculus there's lots of lambda-goodness, too much to summarise here, but includes:
- Functional representations of data and operators on them, beyond Church encodings (Chpt 5): See where Characteristic Predicates and Combinator Parsers 'come from', and how they and many like can be derived
- Typing functions on Church Numbers (Chpt 4, and appendix)

There's also some rather deep foundational discussions
- What actually is 'interpretation' (Chpt 7)
- Turing-Complete computation without using tests
- Language-extension done via definitions, vs via interpetation (Chpt 6)
- That the bit (ie binary) isn't the smallest unit of information