Re: Compilers in six hours

chase@Think.COM (David Chase) writes:
>Reading other people's posts has tweaked a pet peeve of mine -- in many
>cases, I think a course on "compilation" would be well served by studying
>translation to Scheme, or perhaps C.


>5. In many instances, the "little languages" that people "design" have
> such disgusting syntax that the world would be a better place if they
> were replaced with Scheme (plus relevant special-purpose primitives),
> parentheses and all. I'm thinking in particular of sendmail
> configuration files and adb scripts.


Amen. (This is the LEX/YACC school of language design. If you're a
hammer, everything looks like a nail; if you have LEX/YACC, everything
deserves its own crufty idiosyncratic syntax. The Microsoft people
must derive a great deal of pleasure knowing that people all over the
world are up late at night trying to get their win.ini file to work.)


>I think a case could also be made for compilation to Postscript, though
>using a printer as a compute server seems a little silly.


>[Compiling to Postscript is a swell idea. My copy of MS Word does it to
>my documents all the time. So does dvips. -John]


Funny you should mention this. I just did an optimizing Lisp->Postscript
(well, Forth, but I had Postscript handy in my printer) compiler in a very
few pages of Common Lisp. Reference is:


Baker, H.G. Linear Logic and Permutation Stacks -- The Forth Shall Be
First. ACM Computer Architecture News 22,1 (March 1994), 34-43.


I suppose if my arm is twisted, I might make the code available.
--

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