Re: The compilation approach in modern languages

On 9034 day of my life Anton Ertl wrote:
>>Perhaps, (Common) Lisp/Scheme is different from them because
>>COMPILE-FILE is *standard* function.
>
> Hmm, COMPILE-FILE is not quite what I consider compilation at
> run-time. Even in C I can do system("cc ..."); ok, some people have
> used that in combination with dlopen/dlsym to achieve a kind of
> run-time compilation, but it is relatively cumbersome.


... And unportable. For example, default MS Windows installation has
no C compiler. But every standard Lisp system has compiler.


Lisp has COMPILE function that compiles other function. And you can
convert properly created list to compiled function:


(defun compile-at-runtime (the-list)
    (compile nil (coerce the-list 'function)))


> What I am thinking of when I hear Lisp and run-time compilation are
> things like macros and back-quote.


Macros and back-quotes are processed at compile-time.


--
Ivan Boldyrev

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