Re: Safety and power in languages

Christian Fabre <fabre@gr.osf.org>
13 Feb 1996 00:14:23 -0500

          From comp.compilers

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Re: Possible to write compiler to Java VM? ncohen@watson.ibm.com (1996-01-29)
Safety and power in languages truesoft!sw@uunet.uu.net (1996-02-02)
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Re: Safety and power in languages salomon@silver.cs.umanitoba.ca (1996-02-09)
Re: Safety and power in languages truesoft!sw@uunet.uu.net (1996-02-09)
Re: Safety and power in languages mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (1996-02-12)
Re: Safety and power in languages fabre@gr.osf.org (Christian Fabre) (1996-02-13)
Re: Safety and power in languages eachus@spectre.mitre.org (1996-02-13)
Re: Safety and power in languages darius@phidani.be (Darius Blasband) (1996-02-13)
Re: Safety and power in languages Roger@natron.demon.co.uk (Roger Barnett) (1996-02-14)
| List of all articles for this month |

From: Christian Fabre <fabre@gr.osf.org>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.java,comp.compilers,comp.lang.ada
Followup-To: comp.compilers
Date: 13 Feb 1996 00:14:23 -0500
Organization: OSF-RI Grenoble, France.
References: 96-01-116 96-02-026 96-02-057
Keywords: design, comment

Daniel J. Salomon wrote:


> The irony of this discussion is that I am a proponent of safer
> languages myself. I have designed a language called Safer_C, and I
> will be presenting a paper called "Using Partial Evaluation in Support
> of Portability, Reusability, and Maintainability" at the International
> Conference on Compiler Construction CC'96 in Sweden in April. This
> paper proposes to use partial evaluation in place of a preprocessor
> phase.


For portability, the approach with partial evaluation is very
interesting.


Not only does it provides Portability, Reusability and
Maintainability, but if you define an Internediate Language with it,
you also get a medium for software _distribution_ on top of it!


The ANDF language (http://www.osf.org/andf) provides this through
TOKENs, which can be think of as a typed C macro. E.g. on the
development platform, you have a TOKEN prototype for getchar(). The
prototype is used to check that getchar() (and other TOKENs) are used
properly in the source code, if all uses of such tokens are legal, it
produce and IL file. And the instaciation of those TOKENs are
deffered until it reaches the target platform.




Christian.


=====
      Christian Fabre
OSF Research Institute Net: fabre@gr.osf.org
    2 avenue de Vignate Tel: +33 76.63.48.90
  38610 Gieres - France Fax: +33 76.51.05.32
[Hey, haven't heard much about ANDF lately. Is it still alive? -John]
--


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