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Postings from August 2002
On Wed, 21 Aug 2002 18:02:51 +0200 Angel Faus <afaus@corp.vlex.com> wrote:
>I think we all agree that since parrot can have dynamic oplibs (and core
>parrot has hundreds of ops), imcc needs some way to directly express them.
>The idea of having parrot ops be included as such, and imcc directives be
>prepended with "." looks fair to me.
Ok, then this point is settled.
>a) imcc becomes like parrot assembly, but with virtual registers and a few
>administrative ops (for calls and such), that start with "."
>
>or
>
>b) imcc becomes like parrot assembly, but with virtual registers, a few
>administrative ops, and some convenient infix notation like for stuff like "a
=1" or "b = a + 1",
No. :)
c) imcc becomes a "middle" level language.
I never meant it to be an assembler. In practice
intermediate languages provide other constructs
such as aggregate type definition that are not
available in the assembler.
type i : packed int[32]
type r : record { foo : int, bar : string }
This is not assembler. This is medium level
computer language in my book. You could even
see things like
..pragma classes_are_hashes
or something that would tell the compiler that
aggregates should be implemented as standard
"Perl" hashes in this piece of code, whereas
others might want "packed" aggregates with
no runtime introspection capability.
>the usage of parrot ops "as is" is good for us, because we don't need to
>invent, develop, and document, another language. It lets us focus on making
>imcc do well a few tasks (ahem) such as register allocation and
>language-neutral optimitzations.
But I'm willing to invent and develop another language. And it should be a lot
richer than
just an assembler with a register allocator
and spiller. :)
>I am not a priori against imcc diverging from assembly. But I think the only
>good reason for divergence should be making the task of the language compiler
>simpler.
But that was my whole reason for writing it in
the first place. I did not want to target
the assembler directly.
-Melvin