Hacker News Reader

Comment by marktangotango | Hacker News Reader

Using a scheme subset seems like cheating almost. The no syntax, s expression languages allow one to avoid the entire lexing, parsing, ast generation aspect of the endeavor.

Tratt has a blog post that expands on the bit about languages implemented in themselves and the consequences:

http://tratt.net/laurie/blog/entries/the_bootstrapped_compil...

View on HN

"ML -- a domain-specific language for writing ML compilers."

https://twitter.com/samth/status/481759160007004160

ML was created for the LCF theorem prover, not for writing compilers.

It is just a nice side effect that functional programming, as well as, logic programming, make it so easy to write compilers.

Does ML have any logic programming capabilities beyond algebraic pattern matching?

I don't agree.

Niklaus Wirth has bootstrapped all of his languages.

I doubt anyone would say Algol W, Pascal, Modula-2 or Oberon(-7) have compiler development specific features.

Actually, I always suspected that the tagged unions support in Pascal was added specifically for compiler development.

The language used in the article had come to quite an elaborate syntax later in the bootstrap cycle ( http://www.meta-alternative.net/pfdoc.pdf ). So, yes, it's a cheating: using a Lisp-like language to bootstrap a compiler for a high level language with a complex parser.

i don't mind this approach, you can waste an entire day with parsing even for the simplest language, this goes right to the point.

"Parsing is mostly a distraction, because we want to study the parts of programming languages that are not parsing"

http://cs.brown.edu/courses/cs173/2012/book/Everything__We_W...

Parsing is easy, you can hand write a recursive descent parser for a reasonably sane language in a couple hours. As the joke goes, XML and Lisp are languages for those who are afraid of parsers and syntax. Though I'm not sure I would want to argue this point with Shriram.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com