Re: Good practical language and OS agnostic text?

BGB <cr88192@nospam.hotmail.com> wrote:


> this is a hard thing to ask.
>
> There is a lot of possible variation between languages, all of which may
> have notable impact on the "best" compiler design.


I'm not dreaming about "best" just getting a small project going would be
enough to make my day or month etc.


> I have not as of yet seen much of anything which tries to address all
> this, and most focus more narrowly on "a C or Java like language
> compiling directly to native code and using a C-style calling
> convention".


I guess that would be ok, do you have any suggestions on a book like that?


> OS and CPU architecture can impact a fair amount as well, so it could be
> similarly hard to address all of this without making at least some
> assumptions on these fronts.


Fair enough. I didn't think so but everybody seems to be saying that so I
guess that is the way these books are written. I would have thought there is
a lot that has nothing to do with code generation and that code generation
itself aside from optimization obviously would be a pluggable component.


> for example, do they use x86 or ARM as the example? ...


My target would be z/OS and I may want to do it so it can generate code for
MVS and XA and ESA targets as well. If I can get to the code generation part
I'll have no trouble with this actual detail. It's all the stuff before that
and maybe after it, I have no idea how to do.


> like with "authority": many people play "follow the leader", others play
> "oppose the leader", but both are likely pointless.


I have no agenda and I know my limits. I'm not opposed to a book that picks
one way and pretends it's the only way, we've all been around to know that
can't be true. I'm willing to go along for the ride, but I am trying to find
a writer you guys says is trustworthy.


> a person actively "doing their own thing" will not likely play that
> game, and may not really care what the leader thinks, but will in turn
> seem to at times be "following the leader" and "opposing the leader",
> not because they actually are, but because not everything "the leader"
> does is necessarily either right or wrong.


I'm happy to follow the leader on this sort of project because I've never
done it before. I don't pretend to know how to do it and I'd be silly to
pretend that. But I do need something that explains the practical issues and
I don't need to understand the theory to be able to prove anything. If I
can understand /what/ to do I'll eventually understand /why/ it works well
enough for what I need. At some level everything is a black box. Some people
just drill down further than others until they get to that point.


> I don't entirely agree (not being as much of a fan of math either).
> the problem isn't so much about "understanding the topic", so much as
> people often trying to throw mathematical notation at pretty much
> everything.


This issue comes up a lot and it's partly people have worked pretty hard to
amass deep knowledge of a topic and they don't like to see people coming in
and trivializing or disrespecting that and saying you're all silly and I can
do it without all that. Nothing of the kind, I have a lot of respect for
people with the theoretical understanding who've actually written a real,
disciplined compiler according to proper rigorous methods.


My approach is not to dismiss that or say it has no value, quite the
opposite. I don't know what you guys know and I can't learn it quickly
enough so I need some distillation of the theory and a presentation in
a practical way a good programmer who is a very bad mathematician can
understand and actually use.


> often it could be explained easily enough using either natural-language,
> some kind of pseudo-code, or some other specialized (presumably
> non-esoteric) notation.


That is what I thought but everybody else seems to say that isn't true.


> it is kind of defeats the point if a person needs a math degree to even
> figure out what exactly this glob of notation is supposed to be (or even
> what sort of math this is even supposed to be, as it becomes more the
> "find a match the greek letters and other symbols" game).


Yeah that's how I feel.

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