What Makes A Programming Language Good

[spir]

On 01/19/2011 05:16 AM, Jesse Phillips wrote:

 > This is what the "Open Scalable Language Toolchains" talk is about
 > http://vimeo.com/16069687
 >
 > The idea is that the compile has the job of compiling the program and 
providing information about the program to allow other tools to make use 
of the information without their own lex/parser/analysis work. Meaning 
the compile should not have an advantage.

Let us call "decoder" the part of a compiler that scans, parses, 
"semanticises" source code; and (syntactic/semantic) tree the resulting 
representation of code.
What I dream of is a decoder that (on demand) spits out a 
data-description module of this tree. I mean a source code module 
--ideally in the source language itself: here D-- that can be imported 
by any other tool needing as input the said tree .

[D is not that bad as data-desription language, thank to its nice 
literal notations (not comparable to Lua, indeed, but Lua was designed 
for that). It's also easy in D, I guess, to define proper types for the 
various kinds of nodes the tree would hold. D's main obstacle AFAIK is 
data description must all be put in the module's "static this" clause 
(for some reason I haven't yet understood); but we can survive that.]

Denis
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