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Abstract: Java is widely used nowadays and is a frequent
requirement in industry projects. In spite of its great popularity, the
Java language is not very expressive and is being extended to include useful
features such as multiple inheritance, macros, and multiple
dispatch methods.
Most of these extensions look like a translation into the Java realm if some
already developed and well understood features present in Lisp-like
languages.
In this article we present a language and compiler that follows the opposite
idea: we start by designing a restricted version of the Common Lisp language
that can be translated into programmer-readable Java programs. The
resulting language is very similar to Common
Lisp, allowing the programmer to explore many useful features such is
functions, macros, read-macros, optional and keyword arguments, and CLOS.
The compiler takes advantage of Java reflection to obtain type information
from the Java libraries so that its type inferencer frees the programmer from
writing down most type declarations. The compiler is itself written in
CLOS and has a protocol for further
extensions.
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