You and I might not want a Smalltalk syntax in Lisp, but someone who favors Smalltalk (like user coldtea to whom I was responding, who finds that Smalltalk is "better and more concise") might want that.
Fair enough. I was reacting more to what I interpreted as you advocating the approach as opposed to just trying to offer a solution based on coldtea's comment. (I likely had a visceral reaction because I've actually implemented a toy Lisp in Smalltalk and it wasn't something I'd want to do much more than play with)
Have you looked at Ian Piumarta's work with COLAs? Curiously it's a mix of a Smalltalkish higher level object language with a lower-level lisp like language. I never quite understood how they worked together, but maybe you can understand the papers over at vpri.org better than I.
I'm somewhat familiar with Ian's COLA work but am much more familiar with the Smalltalk related portions of the project since I'm currently working with some of those pieces of it. As I understand it, the original intention was to prototype the system in a Smalltalk image and eventually re-target the work to his COLA architecture via OMeta (which the higher-level stuff was written in so retargeting would be done via OMeta parsers and not require many (any?) higher level changes) I think they got some of the lower level things running that way (i.e. I think I recall seeing a demo of at least part of the Nile/Gezira work running as 'native' code but could be remembering it wrong) but due to time/money constraints I don't think they ever got completely there with it as their final demonstration artifact (FRANK) was Smalltalk image-based (plus a couple of plugins for performance). Take this explanation with a grain of salt as I admit to being a bit fuzzy as to how far they got with Ian's lower-level work...
What they were trying to do was demonstrate that they could build the entire system from highest level languages (i.e. the OMeta-based languages they wrote the system in) down to machine code (i.e. what the COLA stuff generated and runtime it provided which would replace the Smalltalk environment) in 20kloc and preserve linkages (i.e. chain-of-meaning) from the top to the bottom. While they may not have technically achieved everything they set out to, I'm sold that they were successful in proving the concept and that they could have gotten there (i.e. the parts they did deliver were impressive) at that order of magnitude in terms of lines of code.
