Hello everybody,
I just finished pushing the compiler refactoring patch that I mentioned earlier. The big change is that now the intermediate ParenScript representation is just s-expressions instead of CLOS objects, which provides several benefits: the intermediate code is now much easier to manipulate and to write code walkers for, which should make things like optimization passes easier to write, it is easily inspectable and serializable, which enables easier debugging and unit testing (I plan to add unit tests for the compiler and the printer now that they have been decoupled). The other big change that accompanies this is that the decision whether to produce expression or statement code has been pushed from the printing code to the actual compiling code, which makes the aforementioned code walkers even more practical. This has also had the effect of simplifying the printing interface considerably (from three functions down to one).
The other changes I made are removing the last of the namespace functions, and the compilation environments. In the place of the namespace code is a mechanism that associates Lisp packages with a string prefix: any symbol in that package is printed with that prefix. I think that unless there are requests for further namespace functionality, that's really all that is necessary for most use cases (avoiding name clashes). The compilation environment and toplevel code I have removed because I feel that the eval-when functionality can be provided in a better way by just using Lisp code, and also to simplify the compiler interface (it's now down to one function from three) and implementation (which, although much simpler now, I think still has some room for improvement).
On a more (or less?) controversial note, I have renamed all the foo-script-blah functions to be foopsblah (except for compile-script-form, which is now compile-parenscript-form). I've come to a pretty definite conclusion that it's not only clearer but also saves considerable typing.
The next course of action I'm planning is to rewrite the way printing is done to simplify things, and correct the currently wonky indentation (a part of the decision for how to indent blocks was done by the compiler code previously, and of course this is currently gone). Once the rewrite is done, I'm planning to update the documentation, fix the deprecated interface, and then make a release.
Happy hacking, Vladimir