<div dir="ltr">On Thu, Nov 22, 2012 at 7:56 AM, Jacques Carette <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:carette@mcmaster.ca" target="_blank">carette@mcmaster.ca</a>></span> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div class="im">On 20/11/2012 6:08 PM, Richard O'Keefe wrote:<br>
</div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div class="im">
On 21/11/2012, at 4:49 AM, <<a href="mailto:citb@lavabit.com" target="_blank">citb@lavabit.com</a>> wrote:<br>
<br>
</div><div class="im"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
Well, I don't know. Would it save some time? Why bother with a core language? <br>
</blockquote>
For a high level language (and for this purpose, even Fortran 66 counts as<br>
"high level") you really don't _want_ a direct translation from source code<br>
to object code. You want to eliminate unused code and you want to do all<br>
sorts of analyses and improvements. It is *much* easier to do all that to<br>
a small core language than to the full source language.<br>
</div></blockquote>
<br>
Actually, here I disagree. It might be much 'easier' for the programmers to do it for a small core language, but it may turn out to be much, much less effective. I 'discovered' this when (co-)writing a partial evaluator for Maple: </blockquote>
<div><br></div><div>You're still using a core language, though; just with a slightly different focus than Haskell's. I already mentioned gcc's internal language, which similarly is larger (semantically; syntactically it's sexprs). What combination is more appropriate depends on the language and the compiler implementation.</div>
<div><br></div></div>-- <br><div dir="ltr"><div>brandon s allbery kf8nh sine nomine associates</div><div><a href="mailto:allbery.b@gmail.com" target="_blank">allbery.b@gmail.com</a> <a href="mailto:ballbery@sinenomine.net" target="_blank">ballbery@sinenomine.net</a></div>
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