On Sun, 18 Sep 2005, Jonathan Roewen wrote:

> Does anyone know of a tool that can convert lisp to ocaml (or
> something other ML dialect)?

For ANSI Common LISP, this could at best work at the level of a LISP 
interpreter (or compiler) written im ML. You cannot directly compile LISP 
code to ML code in the sense that

(defun factorial (n)
  (labels
      ((walk (so-far todo)
	 (if (= todo 0)
	     so-far
	   (walk (* so-far todo) (- todo 1)))))
    (walk 1 n)))

would become

let factorial n =
  let rec walk so_far todo =
      if todo=0
      then so_far
      else walk (so_far*todo) (todo-1)
  in walk 1 n
;;

for a ton of reasons.

> Just all the parentheses gets a bit confusing for a first
> look at lisp ;-)

The trick is:

(1) Do not look at the parentheses. Read and write code by indentation.

(2) Use a text editor that helps you with this.

(3) paren-sensitive syntax highlighting is a great thing.

You will find the parens to be much less confusing once you learned not to 
look at them. :-)


-- 
regards,               tf@cip.physik.uni-muenchen.de              (o_
 Thomas Fischbacher -  http://www.cip.physik.uni-muenchen.de/~tf  //\
(lambda (n) ((lambda (p q r) (p p q r)) (lambda (g x y)           V_/_
(if (= x 0) y (g g (- x 1) (* x y)))) n 1))                  (Debian GNU)