Re: Language design question

Mark K. Gardner <mkg@lanl.gov> schrieb
> Some languages designers, such as Eiffel's Bertrand Meyers, believe
> strongly that you *should* hide the difference between a direct and an
> indirect type (i.e., between a statically allocated variable and a
> dynamically allocated one) to gain the flexibility to change the type
> without changing the text of the code.


Nit to pick: Just "Meyer" without a trailing s.
I agree with Bertrand here, but you have to be careful to make the
difference undetectable from a client's perspective ("client" being
Eiffelese for code that uses the type). For example, a client cannot
assign to an attribute, so the supplier type can really hide all
differences between reference and nonreference attributes.


> This is a personal preference of mine but... I would suggest you get
> rid of the separation between interface and implementation.


Oh yes. The implementation already contains everything, so such a
separation will just force programmers to keep redundant files in sync.
Instead, write a tool that extracts the interface from an
implementation. (If you write a compiler, writing the extraction tool is
a snap.)
For example, Eiffel compilers usually come with a tool named "short"
that takes module as input and generates interface specifications as
output. This "short form" is commonly distributed with library
documentation.


Regards,
Joachim

Return to the comp.compilers page.
Search the comp.compilers archives again.