[skrishnamurthi]

Some of these are good ideas (e.g., nice lexical scoping). Pyret has most of these. Pyret also lacks any complicated, advanced, amazing features, for probably the very same reason you made that suggestion.

Some of these lead to endless bikeshedding (e.g., curly syntax) without much of a way to resolve it. Pyret has one position on these, others may have others.

And some of these are just plain invalid in some contexts (e.g., implement it in C). Our target audience is browser-bound: many of the schools we work with cannot install software on their desktop (so no compiler, IDE, etc.). Implementing in C is therefore a non-starter.

Pyret is therefore built atop JavaScript, targeting JavaScript. However, Pyret is built entirely in Pyret, so if we were to build a different back-end codegen, it would be straightforward to port it.