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Postings from August 2002
At 09:49 PM 8/20/2002 -0700, Sean O'Rourke wrote:
>This is what you'll need. It uses dlopen(), and is likely Bad in a number
>of other ways, but if you're on a fairly normal UNIX, it should allow imcc
>to grok what P6C produces for regexes.
Sean, I'm replying publicly because I'd like to hear other opinions than
mine, yours, Angel's and Leopold's.
I still prefer infix notation to prefix notation for an intermediate language.
I don't understand why it is so hard to adopt. imcc is supposed to be
a step closer to higher level languages, which is why I went that way.
I do realize imcc needs a lot of work (it was just a toy), and I haven't had
the time to put into it, for example, a proper code generator like BURG,
but I would prefer that people to give me convincing arguments on the
syntax issue.
What I have heard is, "Why make imcc use a different syntax, it requires
people to learn a Parrot assembler _and_ imcc."
My answer:
1) People in general don't need to learn either; compiler writers might.
2) If imcc merges toward Parrot syntax, it simply diverges from the next
platform we attempt to target that is not similar to Parrot.
3) imcc will, by definition, have different syntax because it supports higher
level constructs (if statements, call, subs, classes, etc.)
I'm still for what we talked about, where any imcc directive uses a leading '.'
and the rest of the ops are passed through; with the primary exemption
being those ops like set, add, etc. that have more common infix version
like:
a = 1
b = a + 1
All other ops could be looked up from libparrot as I think your patch attempts
to do. Then we can provide enough metadata so the compiler can know
enough to do correct optimization on "pass-through" Parrot ops.
-Melvin