Re: IL design?

Jürgen Kahrs <Juergen.Kahrs@vr-web.de> writes:


> Not joking. C is a portable macro assembly language.


That's what everybody says, but I don't think it's true. I think an
"assembly language" is a language whose semantics are defined in terms
of what code gets generated. The presence of macros and whatnot does
not change this -- even with a macro assembler, the programmer has
complete (or nearly complete) control over the generated code.


A "higher level language" has semantics defined in terms of what the
program does. C is clearly this.


As to using C as the output of a compiler, well it has the advantage
of portability. But C is not really a particularly good language for
this task. There is no way in C to get at the hardware's overflow
detection features. There is no efficient way to implement exception
handlers in terms of C. It is very difficult to create source-level
analysis tools (debuggers and whatnot) if you feed everything through
a C compiler.


I've built compilers that generate C, and it can certainly work, but
it's far from ideal.


- Bob

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