On Saturday 13 Nov 2010 16:34:40 Waldek Hebisch wrote: > Spad compiler is divided into stages. Lexical analysis and parsing > are not a serious problem. Standard tools could help a bit but > actually part that tools can handle is very simple while some > other aspects (like whitespace sensitivity) must be done in > ad-hoc way because tools do not support them.
Better error messages and build environment would be very nice from my point of view! (the error message on the first pass seem worst of all, I can't even work out what line is causing the problem). Regarding whitespace, I seem to remember a message, from you, saying you were planning to delimit blocks using braces instead of indentation? So if you made a clean break to such a syntax would that make things easier? Also, when working on graphics stuff aldor-like OO capability would be very nice. > When one comes to semantic analysis things get more tricky. First, > when trying to write simple specification of what compiler should > do one quickly sees that desired behaviour is not computable. > So one has to introduce restrictions to turn problem into > computable one (but retain as much as possible from nice > features). Second difficulty is that currently at some places > the compiler is doing rather strange things, but if one tries > to disable such behaviour the algebra no longer compiles. I was assuming that a big part of the difficulty is the pattern matching (not sure if that's semantic analysis?) which is why I thought of factoring it out, but I guess there are lots of other issues. > Also, there is a saying that real men can do simultanously > several things. But my experiece is that trying to multitask > slows me down. When I concentate on one thing, I can do it, > then I can move to another thing. In the last two years > I spent most of time working on algebra and only a little > on the compiler. Yes I can't multitask and I would not claim your level of expertise on either, however if you did decide to use standard tools and if you could think of some way that I could help, I would be happy to try to do so. Martin Baker -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "FriCAS - computer algebra system" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/fricas-devel?hl=en.
