Elan is a test project for various approaches towards translating programming languages in the Lisp family, initially using a sub-set of Scheme as the source language to be translated.

It is meant to use table-driven model that can be used for both interpreting and compiling, in which the 'target operations' - whether immediate by-expression execution, translation to an intermediate interpretable form, compilation to an assembly language, compilation to an executable binary, or even some other set of operations which need to parse and walk through Scheme code - can be encapsulated into a closure encapsulating tables of procedures and data needed to perform the translation.

This project is an intermediate experiment meant to further the development of the language Apophasi, which is in turn a simplified testbed for design ideas for a planned production-quality language called Thelema.

Depending on the outcome, the information gleaned from this may also be applied to the associated Assiah assembler and other parts of the toolchain which are intended to accompany Thelema in the future.