Parrot Abstract Syntax Tree in Scheme-XML

As I’m hacking away at Eclectus, Scheme on Parrot in Scheme, I’m starting to pick some Scheme knowledge. So before implementing new features I employed my new wisdom and did some refactoring on my Scheme code.

The most nasty thing in compiler.scm was the generation of PIR while traversing the to-be-compiled s-expression. I decided to use XML Infoset as an intermediate representation, as I already have an XSLT sheet for generating a PIR representation of PAST from an XML representation of PAST. The nice thing is that the XML infoset can also be represented as a Scheme s-expression, that is SXML. The Scheme librarx SSAX-SXML can turn SXML into XML and perform XSLT operations.

For an example let’s look at the Scheme form: (fx+ (fx+ -10 11) (fx+ (fx+ 4 3) (fx+ 3 3)))