Re: Idle musings on doing E over again

Dan Bornstein <[email protected]> Sun, 30 Sep 2012 17:06:30 -0700
Newsgroups gmane.comp.lang.e.general
Message-ID <CAE1-sY0Gc07V6c0p-MTQxE-TzOFs_VwsVMMY374E-uW4muWfLg@mail.gmail.com>
On Fri, Sep 28, 2012 at 8:32 PM, Kevin Reid <kpreid-M/[email protected]> wrote:
> Can you say something about what tools you researched?

To be clear, this wasn't academic research, and I didn't take notes.
Just briefly, I looked at / considered all of these (in no particular
order, and almost certainly missing some): JavaScript / V8 / Node,
Clojure, Go, LLVM, ANTLR, lex/yacc, C++, peg/leg, Haxe/NekoVM, and
Erlang.

> Parsing should be in the standard library. I'm not sure that a particular parsing technique should be built into the *language*.

At least for my own current work, I'm interested in making parsing
more fundamental, but YMMV of course!

My take is that tools like Awk (and to a lesser extent JavaScript)
have amply demonstrated that baking particular parsing techniques into
the language itself can make for a compelling programming experience.
I'm interested in exploring this space, but with a parsing language
that's better than standard(ish) regex syntax.

> I don't care for working with self-hosting-only systems because I want to be able to take it apart and change everything and not have a bootstrapping problem.

I generally agree. To reiterate, I am interested in a self-hosted
system as a platform for further development. I am looking forward to
doing a lot of non-self-hosted work on top of that platform.

> Wish me sufficient free time!

I wish you sufficient free time!

-dan