On Tue, Nov 27, 2007 at 10:08:04AM -0800, Ian Piumarta wrote: > On Nov 23, 2007, at 12:22 AM, St?phane Conversy wrote: > >> I still don't fully understand the goal of fonc/idst (or COLA ? or LOLA ?) > > Think of it as 'factory tooling'. If you have a lathe and a milling > machine you can build lathes and milling machines easily; without them, > building the same tools is much harder. *OLA is (converging on ;-) the > minimal programming language tooling needed to make (very easily) new > programming languages, with minimal assumptions (static, dynamic, > incremental, offline, etc...), including itself (in its entirety). The > properties that fall out from this make it attractive for any programming > task, not just language implementation.
What sort of properties? It seems the same concepts applied to programming languages could be applied to computer languages too, so Cola could be used to build parsers for languages such as: PNG ZIP OGG IPv6 Disk File Systems These are languages with a completely different set of constraints than human-readable languages. Constraints here include: compactness, automatic error correction, and ease-of-decoding. Do you feel that these are some of the tools that Cola could help build? If so, how would cola help with building these, as opposed to the current practice of building a dedicated library for each? > (Interesting thing about tooling: it often ends up begin more valuable than > the artefacts that it manufactured.) I don't understand this comment -- Matthew Fulmer -- http://mtfulmer.wordpress.com/ Help improve Squeak Documentation: http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/808 _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
