Re: Safety and power in languages

Daniel J. Salomon wrote:


> The irony of this discussion is that I am a proponent of safer
> languages myself. I have designed a language called Safer_C, and I
> will be presenting a paper called "Using Partial Evaluation in Support
> of Portability, Reusability, and Maintainability" at the International
> Conference on Compiler Construction CC'96 in Sweden in April. This
> paper proposes to use partial evaluation in place of a preprocessor
> phase.


For portability, the approach with partial evaluation is very
interesting.


Not only does it provides Portability, Reusability and
Maintainability, but if you define an Internediate Language with it,
you also get a medium for software _distribution_ on top of it!


The ANDF language (http://www.osf.org/andf) provides this through
TOKENs, which can be think of as a typed C macro. E.g. on the
development platform, you have a TOKEN prototype for getchar(). The
prototype is used to check that getchar() (and other TOKENs) are used
properly in the source code, if all uses of such tokens are legal, it
produce and IL file. And the instaciation of those TOKENs are
deffered until it reaches the target platform.




Christian.


=====
      Christian Fabre
OSF Research Institute Net: fabre@gr.osf.org
    2 avenue de Vignate Tel: +33 76.63.48.90
  38610 Gieres - France Fax: +33 76.51.05.32
[Hey, haven't heard much about ANDF lately. Is it still alive? -John]
--

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