Some
of the readers of the Lambda blog (http://lambda.weblogs.com/discuss/msgReader$8778?mode=topic&y=2003&m=9&d=18
)
were discussing my earlier throwaway line about Waldemar Horwat.
The
august Waldemar Horwat -- who was at one time the lead Javascript developer at AOL-Time-Warner-Netscape
-- once told me that he considered Javascript to be just another syntax for Common
Lisp. I'm pretty sure he was being serious.
One
user commented:
Mozilla's CVS
tree still contains the original implementation of Javascript... written in Common
Lisp.
Now,
I can't look at the mozilla sources for legal reasons, so I can't say for sure. However,
if you look at the drafts of the ECMAScript 4 specification that Waldemar was writing
when he worked at Netscape, you'll see that he uses this denotational semantics metalanguage
to describe the operation of the ECMAScript language. (This
stands in marked contrast to the vague operational semantics used for the same purpose
in the ECMAScript 1, 2 and 3 specifications.)
I
vaguely recall that Waldemar had built a reference implementation of ECMAScript 4
in his metalanguage, and an implementation of the metalanguage in Common Lisp. (Like
I said, that guy is hard core.) I hypothesize
that this is the thing that the Lambda reader was talking about. If
someone could confirm or deny my hypothesis for me, I'd be interested to know. It
is unfortunate that I'm unable to look at this stuff, as I'm sure it would be fascinating.
