Python syntax in Lisp and Scheme

[Andrew Dalke]

Alex Martelli:
> Absolutely!  But funding such studies would seem hard.  Unless some
> company or group of volunteers had their own reasons to take some
> existing large app coded in Lisp/Python/Perl/Ruby, and recode it in
> one of the other languages with essentially unchanged functionality,

I keep thinking that the bioperl/biopython/bioruby/biojava code bases
would be a source of data for such a study, but upon just a bit of
thinking I realized that each of the projects has a different way of
dealing with a problem.  There is overlap between the two, but even
at the file parsing level, bioperl's approach is different from biojava's
and quite different from biopython's.

Another possibility is the code needed for some cross-platform
standard, like a DOM.  That's possible, but I suspect there are
large variations in code size even amoung the Python DOMs,
as well as little likelihood of full compliance by all code bases.

                    Andrew
                    dalke at dalkescientific.com