Walter Bright:
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1vtm2l/so_you_want_to_write_your_own_language_dr_dobbs/
Thank you for the simple nice article.
The poisoning approach. [...] This is the approach we've been
using in the D compiler, and are very pleased with the results.<
Yet, even in D most of the error messages after the first few
ones are often not so useful to me. So perhaps I'd like a
compiler switch to show only the first few error messages and
then stop the compiler.
Automated documentation generator. [...] Before Ddoc, the
documentation had only a random correlation with the code, and
too often, they had nothing to do with each other. After Ddoc,
the two were brought in sync.<
And now the situation is even better, we have documentation
unittests and the function arguments are verified to be in sync
with their ddoc comment. Probably there's some space for further
improvements.
One semantic technique that is obvious in hindsight (but took
Andrei Alexandrescu to point out to me) is called "lowering."<
In Haskell the GHC compiler goes one step further, it translates
all the Haskell code into an intermediate code named Core, that
is not the language of a virtual machine, it's still a functional
language, but it's simpler, lot of the syntax differences between
language constructs is reduced to a much reduced number of mostly
functional stuff.
My general rule is if the explanation for what the function does
is more lines than the implementation code, then the function is
likely trivia and should be booted out.<
In Haskell there's a standard module named Prelude, it's imported
on default and defined lot of functions, etc of general use. Most
functions in it are only few lines long (often 2-3 lines long,
with some functions up to 10-13 lines long).
Bonus: the cute idea of a language for students:
http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~felipe/IFT2030-Automne2002/Complements/tinyc.c
(On Reddit I seem to see some comments, like structs not allowing
constructors?)
Bye,
bearophile
