On Tue, 5 Aug 2003, Joseph Ryan wrote:
> >Okay, I don't have a good syntax in mind yet,
> >the point is it's a template language and you
> >can subclass/override/extend the template.
> >Maybe there's no syntax and it just uses
> >cleanly coded classes in some oo language.
> >Or perl6 with it's grammars and rules. I
> >don't know.
> >
> I think that trying to define a new syntax for a new meta-language
> is a bad idea. The goal of a GCG (Generic Code Generator) should be
> to allieviate the compiler writers of the responsiblity of
> generating code. Forcing them to generate different code doesn't
> help solve the problem. (-:
Good point. I don't think I was very clear yesterday. Let
me try again. Let's say you're generating... I dunno.. haskell:
haskell_parser -> ast -> pirate -> parrot_code --> imcc -> pbc
^
|
parrot_code__templates
So the haskell parser only has to generate a pirate ast structure.
Either that's a very basic string (I like your XML idea) *or*, in
the future, the parser calls pirate tree-building-methods directly.
The tree-building methods are why I was talking about C, but for
now, I don't mind doing a bunch of xml-generation every time we
call eval/exec. (It's probably the simplest thing to do right now
and should be pretty easy for everyone)
> 1.) Instead of forcing the compiler writer to generate code, the
> compiler writer would only have to transform the parse tree into a
> structure that is name-consistant with the GCG's standard, and then
> use any of a number of existing libraries to dump the tree as
> YAML/XML.
I like it! :)
> 2.) Since there are more YAML/XML parsers than I can count
> implemented in nearly modern useful language I can think of, the GCG
> could be generated in any language without causing a stall on
> starting on the generic code generation part of the project. (you
> know, the important part)
Agreed!
> 3.) It would be possible to handle language-specific nodes by
> defining some sort of "raw" node whose value could be raw imcc code.
That's where the templates come in, but since my crack
at a template language last night sucked so bad, I'm
thinking that at least for prototyping I'm going to
use a python class.
So I'm thinking I'm going to try refactoring so that
I can do this:
pypirate something.py > something.xml
cat something.xml > pirate -l python > something.imc
imcc something.imc
or just:
pypirate something.py | pirate -l python | imcc
or just:
pypyrate -r something.py
That also means the "pirate" command can be written in
any language we like. Probably eventually that'll be
perl6, but for now (unless someone else wants to
volunteer some code) I plan to work from the code
I have for python.
Sincerely,
Michal J Wallace
Sabren Enterprises, Inc.
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