[HN Gopher] Rabbit Scheme Compiler
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       Rabbit Scheme Compiler
        
       Author : swatson741
       Score  : 54 points
       Date   : 2023-07-03 08:38 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | soegaard wrote:
       | In case anyone is wondering about the name Rabbit.
       | 
       | It's an old pun in the Scheme world to make Scheme compilers have
       | a name that ends in "bit". I know at least three:
       | 
       | - Orbit - Rabbit - Gambit
        
         | allenrb wrote:
         | I confess to hoping this was a compiler for rabbit schemes, but
         | no such luck. Those things are everywhere around me (near
         | Chicago, IL) and it would have been insightful to do some
         | reverse-engineering. Alas, their schemes shall remain
         | mysterious.
        
         | xscott wrote:
         | Maybe you'd include Twobit in that list:
         | http://larcenists.org/twobit.html
        
           | soegaard wrote:
           | I had forgotten aboout "TwoBit".
           | 
           | The name Larceny is a pun too btw.
        
         | belmarca wrote:
         | BTW, I have Kranz's Orbit thesis on my desk. Nice and succinct!
        
         | mrweasel wrote:
         | I though it was due to the world already having Chicken Scheme
         | and Gerbil Scheme, neither of which ends in "bit".
         | 
         | Edit: Rabbit seems to be older than both of those two schemes.
        
         | neilv wrote:
         | Gambit also hits another naming convention for Scheme
         | implementations: that they be synonyms for "scheme" or related
         | to it.
         | 
         | Scheme, Gambit, Racket, Guile, Larceny.
         | 
         | Gauche might be an antonym?
         | 
         | (IIRC, Racket got its name shortly before they were looking
         | into promoting its use on Wall Street. I guess OCaml didn't
         | have the problem of lighting up the regulatory compliance
         | monitoring board every time someone mentioned "Racket" in
         | email.)
        
           | davexunit wrote:
           | Guile has the extra layer of being "Guy L." (Steele)
        
           | soegaard wrote:
           | Also: Picobit and Picbit.
        
           | CodeArtisan wrote:
           | >Gauche might be an antonym?
           | 
           | IIRC it is a reference to this (Gauche author is Japanese)
           | 
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauche_the_Cellist
        
         | belmarca wrote:
         | And Ribbit: https://github.com/udem-dlteam/ribbit.
        
         | EdwardCoffin wrote:
         | I understood it was wordplay from _lapin_ , the French word for
         | rabbit. The way I remember it is it was a program that took an
         | input of Lisp Assembly Programs (LAP-in). I can't find a source
         | for this, so I may be misremembering parts of it, particularly
         | the expansion of the acronym.
        
         | abecedarius wrote:
         | Rabbit was the first. I read somewhere that this was a kind of
         | pun on the MacLisp LAPIN function. LAPIN assembled LAP code,
         | Lisp Assembly Program (the penultimate stage of compilation),
         | and 'lapin' is French for rabbit.
        
       | Zambyte wrote:
       | Here is the report that defined Rabbit:
       | https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/6913/AITR-474...
        
       | abecedarius wrote:
       | Guy Steele's master's thesis explains the ideas, and includes
       | this code as an appendix with extra comments on the facing pages
       | (from page 117):
       | https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/6913/AITR-474...
       | 
       | I also added extra comments (my own notes as I figured things
       | out) in a copy up on my old website (with permission) -- I didn't
       | know about the above appendix at the time. I'm not sure if it'd
       | add anything to the above, but I could dig it up.
       | 
       | Related work at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Lambda_Papers
        
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       (page generated 2023-07-04 23:02 UTC)