On Oct 11, 11:46 am, Lawrence D'Oliveiro <l...@geek- central.gen.new_zealand> wrote: > Nowadays we take it for granted that the core language should be a strong > and compact basis to build on, rather than providing lots of built-in > features, and all the rest should come from run-time libraries.
Fast forward to 1972... In 1972 British Military implemented USE, KEEP and HERE for ALGOL 68RS and then in 1978... Check out NEST and EGG in "Formal Definition of Modules and Separate Compilation". http://www.google.com.au/search?q=%22A-Modules-and-Separate-Compilation-facility-for-ALGOL-68%22 9.4.1.d module symbol{49a} MODULE access symbol{36b} ACCESS def symbol{49c} DEF fed symbol{49c} FED public symbol{36d,41e} PUB postlude symbol{49f} POSTLUDE {{Moreover, two more new symbols are yet to be invented for use in separate compilation:}} formal nest symbol{56b} NEST egg symbol{A6a,c} EGG These were defined to avoid things like C's problem with "#include" For example a typical 5 line program can require the compilation of a 163kb file, 5 linesor original source becomes almost 5 thousand lines of pre-processed source e.g.: $ cat hello_world.c #include <stdlib.h> #include <stdio.h> int main(int c, char *argv, char *argp){ printf("Hello, world!\n"); } $ gcc -C -E hello_world.c -o hello_world.txt $ wc hello_world.txt 4554 24360 163915 hello_world.txt The idea would be to compile the text file one and generate one compiled file contains the required symbols... bingo, there you have it. Compilations are potentially 1000x faster? Hence the NEST and EGG idea. The Soviet GOST standard details the standardisation of NEST and EGG (Page 271): http://vak.ru/lib/exe/fetch.php/book/gost/pdf/gost-27975-88.pdf (altogether there are also: MODULE, ACCESS, DEF, FED, PUB, POSTLUDE, NEST & EGG) (BTW: The Soviet standard also details the use of ON, EXCEPTION and RAISE, on page 269) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
