Re: Looking for volunteers for XL

Kaz Kylheku <kaz@kylheku.com> wrote:


(snip)
>> Extensible languages have to be used with some care I think. Those
>> features aren't for everyday use.


> Actually, perhaps surprisingly, language extensibility features are for
> everyday use.


(snip)


> This is worth doing for language extensions that are significant, and
> of interest to a wider community of people. But it's a time-consuming
> process.


Not that I completely understand XL, but we also have languages with
preprocessors, simple and not so simple. We also have processors,
sometimes in the form of macroprocessors, that allow one to modify the
language accepted by the processor.


Some years ago, when Fortran 66 was popular, but not quite as easy to
use as it could have been, languages like RATFOR and MORTRAN were
created, along with the appropriate processor. Still, such never got
quite as popular as one might have hoped.


> Extensibility in the language allows such a thing to be conducted as a
> project which regularly releases code (rather than just paper).


> It also allows some fraction of any application to consist of some
> extensions to give it a little domain-specific language or whatever.


Now, if one includes the description (or macros) needed for the
extension as part of the source file does it still count as an
extension?


(snip)
> Under an extensible language culture, the lone guru working in
> isolation produces not a new language, but some new extension. These
> can be released as code for people to try. Then when the bug reports
> pour in and it's all hammered out, a formal spec can be written. The
> guru deosn't get to ask everyone to ditch their language, only to add
> something to it.


But consider how new standard versions of a language get created.
One usually adds extensions to an existing compiler, tests out
the new features for a while, and then standardizes the result.


That is different from an extensible language, but it seems
to me that the result isn't so different.


(snip)


-- glen

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