That's true, but the fact that we're both able to make analogies just suggests that analogies aren't a good defense for your system. It isn't self-evident that "eliminating different syntaxes" is always a good thing. You need to actually take the trouble to motivate it.

In my experience the hard part of dealing with polyglot systems is juggling the different semantics. Syntax is in the noise. Should it be the same or different? It just doesn't seem worth thinking about.

Don't get me wrong, I find Lisp's uniform syntax very helpful. But Lisp is helpful also because of its (relatively) uniform semantics. While adding Lisp syntax atop say Erlang seems useful, mixing LFE and regular Scheme would be a nightmare.

> What happens when 2 languages use the same keyword but with different semantics and it happens that a 3rd language embeds them both?

Yes, I can relate to this question. For example, here's a fragment from the Mu codebase where I embed tests containing Mu programs in my C++ implementation: http://akkartik.github.io/mu/html/040brace.cc.html#366. The Mu instruction is `return-if`, but because it's in a C++ file, just the `return` is highlighted. Super ugly.

My take-away from all this: polyglot systems are a bad idea. Mu's implementation being in C++ is hopefully a temporary state of affairs. We shouldn't be picking "the right tool for the job". Software is more malleable than past tools. We should be tweaking our one language to do everything the job needs.

So rather than try to come up with solutions for polyglot programming, I'd just discourage it altogether.