Hi John
The simple answer is that Tom's stuff happened in the early 80s, and I was out
of PARC working on things other than Smalltalk.
I'm trying to remember something similar that was done earlier (by someone
can't recall who, maybe at CMU) that was a good convincer that this was not a
great UI style for thinking about programming in.
An interesting side light on all this is that -- if one could avoid paralyzing
nestings in program form -- the tile based approach allows language building
and extensions *and* provides the start of a UI for doing the programming that
feels "open". Both work at Disney and the later work by Jens Moenig show that
tiles start losing their charm in a hurry if one builds nested expressions. An
interesting idea via Marvin (in his Turing Lecture) is the idea of "deferred
expressions", and these could be a way to deal with some of this. Also the
ISWIM design of Landin uses another way to defer nestings to achieve better
readability.
Cheers,
Alan
>________________________________
> From: John Zabroski <johnzabro...@gmail.com>
>To: Florin Mateoc <fmat...@yahoo.com>; Fundamentals of New Computing
><fonc@vpri.org>
>Sent: Thursday, April 12, 2012 3:59 PM
>Subject: Re: [fonc] Kernel & Maru
>
>
>It depends what your goals are. If you want to automatically derive an IDE
>from a grammar then the best work is the Synthesizer Generator but it is
>limited to absolutely noncircular attribute grammars IIRC. But it had wicked
>cool features like incremental live evaluation. Tom Reps won a ACM
>Disssrtation award for the work. The downside was scaling this approach to
>so-called very large scale software systems. But there are two reasons why I
>feel that concern is overblown: (1) nobody has brute forced the memory
>exhaustion problem using the cloud (2) with systems like FONC we wouldnt be
>building huge systems anyway.
>Alternatively, "grammarware" hasn't died simply because of the SG scaling
>issue. Ralf Lammel, Eelco Visser and others have all contributed to ASF+SDF
>and the Spoofax language environment. But none of these are as cool as SG and
>with stuff like Spoofax you have to sidt thru Big And Irregular APIs for IME
>hooking into Big And Irregular Eclipse APIs. Seperating the intellectual wheat
>from the chaff was a PITA.... Although I did enjoy Visser's thesis on
>scannerless parsing which led me to apprrciate boolean grammars.
>Alan,
>A question for you is Did SG approach ever come up in desivn discuszions or
>prototypes for any Smalltalk? I always assumed No due to selection bias...
>Until Ometa there hasnt been a clear use case.
>Cheers,
>Z-Bo
>On Apr 11, 2012 10:21 AM, "Florin Mateoc" <fmat...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>Yes, these threads are little gems by themselves, thank you!
>>
>>
>>I hope I am not straying too much from the main topic when asking about what
>>I think is a related problem: a great help for playing with languages are the
>>tools. Since we are talking about bootstrapping everything, we would ideally
>>also be able to generate the tools together with all the rest. This is a
>>somewhat different kind of language bootstrap, where actions and predicates
>>in the language grammar have their own grammar, so they don't need to rely on
>>any host language, but still allow one to flexibly generate a lot of
>>boilerplate code, including for example classes (or other language specific
>>structures) representing the AST nodes, including visiting code, formatters,
>>code comparison tools, even abstract(ideally with a flexible level of
>>abstraction)evaluation code over those AST nodes, and debuggers. This
>>obviously goes beyond language syntax, one needs an execution model as well
>>(perhaps in combination with a worlds-like approach). I am still not
sure how far one can go, what can be succinctly specified and how.
>>
>>
>>
>>I would greatly appreciate any pointers in this direction
>>
>>
>>Florin
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>________________________________
>> From: Monty Zukowski <mo...@codetransform.com>
>>To: Fundamentals of New Computing <fonc@vpri.org>
>>Sent: Wednesday, April 11, 2012 12:20 AM
>>Subject: Re: [fonc] Kernel & Maru
>>
>>Thank you everyone for the great references. I've got some homework
>>to do now...
>>
>>Monty
>>
>>On Tue, Apr 10, 2012 at 2:54 PM, Ian Piumarta <piuma...@speakeasy.net> wrote:
>>> Extending Alan's comments...
>>>
>>> A small, well explained, and easily understandable example of an iterative
>>> implementation of a recursive language (Scheme) can be found in R. Kent
>>> Dybvig's Ph.D. thesis.
>>>
>>> http://www.cs.unm.edu/~williams/cs491/three-imp.pdf
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>> Ian
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> fonc mailing list
>>> fonc@vpri.org
>>> http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
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