Re: [Axiom-developer] Aldor and Lisp

[Camm Maguire]

Greetings!

"Page, Bill" <address@hidden> writes:

> On Tuesday, October 18, 2005 6:43 PM Gaby wrote:
> > 
> > "Page, Bill" <address@hidden> writes:
> > 
> > | ... Aldor is a complex very high level language - not so
> > | different from Haskell or Ocaml and it certainly took a major
> > | effort to implement usable compilers for those languages.
> > 
> > Indeed.  But the positive side of it is that those are now part
> > of common knowledge and it is not like everything has to be
> > rediscovered over again.  We have more foresight -- based on
> > the accumulated knowledge -- than they did when they started
> > implementing those compilers :-) And I bet the experience with
> > Haskell or Ocaml or functional language with dependent types
> > will be valuable for implementing Aldor.  So, while I agree
> > with your points, we must also keep in fore that one would not
> > start totally "clueless"...
> > 
> 
> I agree. In fact to take best advantage of this knowledge, perhaps
> we might seriously consider the possibility of writing "new Aldor"
> in a language like Ocaml. I think Ocaml might be a better choice
> than Haskell since both Ocaml and Aldor are not strictly functional
> languages like Haskell. Also, given the interest in applying
> proof techniques in Axiom, it might be interesting to note that
> Coq http://coq.inria.fr/ is written in Ocaml http://caml.inria.fr/ocaml/
> which is supposed to be a "high-performance native-code compiler".
> 

Can't believe this thread has come full circle like this!  Wow.  May I
please suggest if this is ever of interest that we consider using the
ML that built atop GCL for many years and appears quite close to doing
so now?    Then everything stays in one image.  Or at least we could
use it as the basis for a complete implementation in lisp.

I still remain confused on a point though -- I thought there was a
reliable translator from aldor to spad and vice versa?  Why do we need
to reimplement an aldor compiler, rather than provide spad with the
missing abilities?

Take care,


> Regards,
> Bill Page.
> 
> 
> 

-- 
Camm Maguire                                            address@hidden
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