On Thu, Nov 22, 2012 at 7:56 AM, Jacques Carette <carette@mcmaster.ca> wrote:
On 20/11/2012 6:08 PM, Richard O'Keefe wrote:
On 21/11/2012, at 4:49 AM, <citb@lavabit.com> 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.

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