Tarmo Pikaro wrote:
If you consider different languages - c, c++, java - they are not much different
- syntax somehow vary, but you can basically create the same application using
different languages. "Generic" tries to generalize structures available in all
languages
into common form. I think common form is good, but why again on earth we should
stick
to existing languages ? Let's take this more common language, remove all syntax
which is
not commonly used, simplify a bit, and voila - we have completely new language,
which
is not bound to lexical and semantical syntax analysis (because it's edited
directly),
which can be edited much faster, and require minimum effort for recompilation
(don't need
to recompile whole application just because you have edited one line of code).
Language which syntax can change more easily (since you don't have to consider what
kind of reduce/shift conflict you came accross). Language for which you don't need
to use compiler / linker anymore.
One advantage of most computer languages (with the arguable exception of
C, but even it has preprocessor macros) is that they provide high-level
constructs that make it easier to write programs. I believe that many
of these high-level constructs are reduced to more verbose lower-level
constructs in some of the language front ends (I know that this is true
in Fortran; I'm not as sure about other front ends), which means that
programming in Generic will require programming at a much lower level.
I don't think your expected advantages to editing the compiler's
representation directly will counteract that disadvantage.
But I could be wrong.
- Brooks
