Re: What's the word for...

CNS-ksf-+Jordan T.J. (tjj@netnews.summit.novell.com) wrote:
: Could someone please tell me what the word is for a language
: which can be written in itself?
: Thanks


I believe that all languages that contain recursion and the ability to
read the nth element of a list (array or car/cdr nest) can be written in
themselves. A group I worked with added recursion to occam for the
expressed purpose of writing the language comiler in the language - we
called it a bootstrapable language, as the process of constructing a
compiler for a language in the language is called bootstrapping.


--
Debora Weber-Wulff, Professorin fuer Softwaretechnik und Programmiersprachen
snail: Technische Fachhochschule Berlin, FB Informatik,
              Luxemburgerstr. 10, 13353 Berlin, Germany
email: weberwu@tfh-berlin.de
--

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