Re: Re: software design clarification

Markus Elfring wrote:
> 
>> you are losing me too. please rephrase.
>> The word "platform" is used in Java case to refer to the virtual
>> machine, not the language. And this is extension of hardware platform
>> in computing context.
>>   
> 
> I've got several software platforms in mind that are mainly
> characterised by the programming language that will be used to implement
> the data processing for the source files. The currently discussed
> implementation languages do provide similar features like inheritance
> (object-orientation) and exception handling. The supported features can
> be mapped to different syntaxes. It is unclear if such a mapping from a
> high-level class specification to the target language can be
> automatically performed by a free tool in all use cases.

What makes the discussion difficult is the level of abstraction. IMO there
isn't much sense even to think about "all use cases".
Let's take "abstraction" as a process, starting with concrete use cases,
and looking for commonalities. So one question becomes: "What programming
languages can be represented by the Synopsis AST ?".

> - SWIG shows an example for the creation of interfaces from C++ to other
> targets.

AFAIU, swig does quite the opposite from Synopsis. It takes a high-level
interface description, and generates wrapper code. However, pyste and py++
already come much closer (hi Roman !): you parse code in one language, extracting
interface information, and then generate bindings for another language.
It is in this source-to-source translation that is in the scope of Synopsis.

> - IDL specifies another mapping for CORBA services.

IDL is nothing but a language. There are various language bindings that
define the mapping to language-specific interfaces. So this, too, is a simple
matter of code generation, not code inspection.

> Is the structure of the class libraries that are provided by Synopsis
> for Python and C++ similar?

What 'libraries' do you have in mind ? The code implementing a C++ compiler
frontend surely isn't related to python at all.

Regards,
		Stefan

-- 

      ...ich hab' noch einen Koffer in Berlin...