Re: [Haskell-cafe] Compilers: Why do we need a core language?

On Thu, Nov 22, 2012 at 7:56 AM, Jacques Carette wrote:

On 20/11/2012 6:08 PM, Richard O'Keefe wrote:

...

On 21/11/2012, at 4:49 AM, wrote:

Well, I don't know. Would it save some time? Why bother with a core

...

language?

For a high level language (and for this purpose, even Fortran 66 counts as "high level") you really don't _want_ a direct translation from source code to object code. You want to eliminate unused code and you want to do all sorts of analyses and improvements. It is *much* easier to do all that to a small core language than to the full source language.

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:

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. -- brandon s allbery kf8nh sine nomine associates allbery.b@gmail.com ballbery@sinenomine.net unix/linux, openafs, kerberos, infrastructure http://sinenomine.net