On Apr 9, 2011, at 7:44 PM, Alan Kay wrote: > These approaches are always fun to look at. > > A good question here is whether this many-level scheme is better than to pick > something like a simple Lisp-like or OMeta-like language (e.g. it came from > Meta II, which is really simple) that can output machine code and simply hand > translate the first version into machine code.
Not to be pedantic, but I think it really depends what you mean by "better". For FONC's goals, no doubt the most declarative, semantic-dense representations are the "best". These will often fall back on some sort of fixed points of meta-circularity. >From a pedagogical viewpoint though, meta-circular programs always seems to >hurt my mind (in a good way) until my mind itself can steady on the >fixed-point. With the stepwise approach there is much less expressiveness at >each level but there is also never any "magic". Everything is quite procedural >and power is only gained by simple accretion: 1) pure assembly bits 2) labels 2) structured programming 3) function calls Most new-comers are often mystified by the magic between the compiler's runtime environment (the program's static-ish environment) and the program's runtime. After you've done it yourself a few times you finally grok it. I wonder if it's similar here. I'm not saying that everyone will naturally re-discover McCarthy's lisp-in-lisp by just being exposed to the accretion method but it seems like a lisp-in-lisp is more digestible after having made a few "static" systems. shawn > > Cheers, > > Alan > > From: Shawn Morel <[email protected]> > To: Fundamentals of New Computing <[email protected]> > Sent: Sat, April 9, 2011 3:37:03 PM > Subject: [fonc] bootstrapping B > > I don't recall seeing this posted before. A few layers of 386 raw op-code > bootstrapping successively more powerful environments (up to the point of > macros that do sys calls and things like 'get-token:') > > There's something quite appealing about the minimalism of the linear approach > (on top of bare metal) compared to the more brain twisting 'bootstrap in C to > rewrite in the new environment.' > http://homepage.ntlworld.com/edmund.grimley-evans/bcompiler.html > > cheers, > shawn > _______________________________________________ > fonc mailing list > [email protected] > http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
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