alt Hacker NewsThat seems like a brittle approach to transpilation. A transpiler should translate all of the language's semantics, including resolving identifiers as symbols, and then choose legal names for them in the target language. Also, there is so much more to a language than its surface syntax.
I've never designed a transpiler (I'm not a programmer), but surely the correct approach is to transform the source code into its type-checked AST, and then translate to the target language from there?
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There is a lot of confusion around those words. I personally make a distinction between a "compiler" and a "transpiler".
A compiler preserves the semantics - if you compile Scheme to C, you get a real Scheme program in C, with full semantics.
A transpiler does not have to guarantee that. It is much easier to transpile Python to JavaScript than it is to truly compile Python to JavaScript. A transpiler can tolerate some amount of leakage between worlds (think 'arguments' as a variable name in Python vs JS).
It really depends on your needs. Sometimes a transpiler is okay, sometimes totally inadequate.
I'm really sorry to be harsh but if you don't use programming languages and have never written a transpiler, why should anyone read your comment?
You critique the approach as brittle and yet the approach you propose doesn't solve the thorny problem gp described of a growing ball of reserved keywords.
> A transpiler should translate all of the language's semantics, including resolving identifiers as symbols, and then choose legal names for them in the target language.
Yes, it should; but it also makes things much more difficult. This specific transpiler indeed builds an AST, but does not care about identifiers, just emitting them as is [1] (I hope I found the correct place in the code).
[1]: https://github.com/solod-dev/solod/blob/8485bc867ae0f0269d75...