On 22/11/2012 11:52 AM, Brandon Allbery wrote:
On Thu, Nov 22, 2012 at 7:56 AM, Jacques Carette <care...@mcmaster.ca
<mailto:care...@mcmaster.ca>> wrote:
On 20/11/2012 6:08 PM, Richard O'Keefe wrote:
On 21/11/2012, at 4:49 AM, <c...@lavabit.com
<mailto:c...@lavabit.com>> wrote:
Well, I don't know. Would it save some time? Why bother
with a core language?
For a high level language (and for this purpose, even Fortran
66 counts as
"high level") you really don't _want_ a direct translation
from source code
to object code. You want to eliminate unused code and you
want to do all
sorts of analyses and improvements. It is *much* easier to do
all that to
a small core language than to the full source language.
Actually, here I disagree. It might be much 'easier' for the
programmers to do it for a small core language, but it may turn
out to be much, much less effective. I 'discovered' this when
(co-)writing a partial evaluator for Maple:
You're still using a core language, though; just with a slightly
different focus than Haskell's. I already mentioned gcc's internal
language, which similarly is larger (semantically; syntactically it's
sexprs). What combination is more appropriate depends on the language
and the compiler implementation.
Right, we agree: it is not 'core language' I disagreed with, it is
'smaller core language'. And we also agree that smaller/larger depends
on the eventual application. But 'smaller core language' is so
ingrained as "conventional wisdom" that I felt compelled to offer
evidence against this bit of folklore.
Jacques
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