Re: Code generation / markup language processing

Norman Ramsey <nr@labrador.cs.virginia.edu>
15 Jan 1999 01:11:33 -0500

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Related articles
Code generation / markup language processing sbisse01@harris.com (Scott Bissett) (1999-01-11)
Re: Code generation / markup language processing nr@labrador.cs.virginia.edu (Norman Ramsey) (1999-01-15)
Re: Code generation / markup language processing Martin.Ward@SMLtd.Com (1999-01-20)
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From: Norman Ramsey <nr@labrador.cs.virginia.edu>
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Date: 15 Jan 1999 01:11:33 -0500
Organization: University of Virginia Computer Science
References: 99-01-038
Keywords: code

Scott Bissett <sbisse01@harris.com> wrote:
>I am using a
>tool at work that was developed in-house to generate C-code...
>the only problem is, the architecture of
>the generated C-code is *compiled into the tool*!!!
>
>So, my quest is to build a better code generation tool...


I had reasonable success with a very simple macro-oriented approach.
M4 wasn't quite what I wanted, so I whipped up a preprocessor in Icon
(http://www.cs.arizona.edu/icon) to do the job. This worked fine
until the day we decided we didn't want just to emit C, we also wanted
to be able to emit Modula-3, or Java, or ML, or ... From that point
forward, code has gotten very klunky. The main problem seems to be
finding a reasonable internal representation of `program' that can be
mapped to any one of a number of programming languages. It's hard for
us to decide what features we want to exploit: objects? mutable state?
closures? memory management?


I'd love to hear from others who are successfully using multiple
high-level languages as target languages for a compiler or stub
generator.


Norman


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