On 22/11/2012 7:37 PM, Richard O'Keefe wrote:
On 23/11/2012, at 1:56 AM, Jacques Carette wrote:
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: we actually made our
internal language *larger*, so that we could encode more invariants
syntactically. This ended up making our jobs considerably easier,
because we did not have to work so hard on doing fancy analyses to
recover information that would otherwise have been completely
obvious. Yes, there were a lot more cases, but each case was
relatively easy; the alternative was a small number of extremely
difficult cases.
I don't think we do disagree. We are talking about the same thing:
``not hav[ing] to work so hard on doing fancy analyses''.
The key point is that an (abstract) syntax *designed for the compiler*
and a syntax *designed for programmers* have to satisfy different
design goals and constraints; there's no reason they should be the same.
I must have mis-interpreted what you said then. We definitely agree on
this key point.
Jacques
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