This isn't our idea, but was a favorite topic in the 60s, and was championed by Ted Steel, who proposed than an UNCOL (UNiversal Computer Oriented Language) which could be the intermediary in all translations, especially where the end target was machine code.
As is often the case, something accidental happened that wasn't as good -- namely C. And is often the case, people only interested in short term goals started using C and the larger idea of UNCOL never happened. In some of the other correspondence, the loss of expressibility through translation is mentioned. UNCOL also had this problem. I think quite a bit of work by an expert system has to be added to something like OMeta in order to both retain expressibility, recover it, and generate it (when the target is more expressive than the source). (And Frank isn't awesome yet, but we have achieved a small measure of scary ...) Cheers, Alan ________________________________ From: Julian Leviston <[email protected]> To: Fundamentals of New Computing <[email protected]> Sent: Fri, April 8, 2011 8:56:48 PM Subject: Re: [fonc] Question about OMeta Thanks for responding to my stupid question. :-) OMeta is quite simple, which makes it very very difficult for me to think about sometimes (often!) :) That's pretty fricking awesome... because it obviously means you just have to do two translations to get all the existing translations to and from other languages "for free"... including compilers and interpreters. I guess this is why Frank is so potentially amazingly awesome, right? It's built on this idea :) I also really like the idea that you're not just "throwing away" all the existing stuff in the process of readdressing these extremely base level concerns... because it's obvious that that doesn't work. You guys rock :) I just wanna take this opportunity to give thanks that there are still people like you who are continuing this sort of things for the good of us all. Julian. On 09/04/2011, at 7:46 AM, Alan Kay wrote: It does that all the time. An easy way to do it is to make up a universal semantics, perhaps in AST form, then write translators into and out of. > >Cheers, > >Alan > > > > ________________________________ From: Julian Leviston <[email protected]> >To: Fundamentals of New Computing <[email protected]> >Sent: Fri, April 8, 2011 7:24:28 AM >Subject: [fonc] Question about OMeta > >I have a question about OMeta. > >Could it be used in any way to efficiently translate programs between >languages? >I've been thinking about this for a number of months now... and it strikes me >that it should be possible...? > >Julian. >_______________________________________________ >fonc mailing list >[email protected] >http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc >_______________________________________________ >fonc mailing list >[email protected] >http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc >
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