Re: Supercompiled Perl

Dear Helmut,

Thanks a lot for your letter.  Writing a supercompiler for PERL is a very good idea.
 Should anybody embark on it, we in the Refal group will gladly share our experience.

Best wishes.

Valentin Turchin



-----Original Message-----
From: Helmut Enck-Radana <[email protected]>
To: [email protected] <[email protected]>
Cc: Jordan Dimov <[email protected]>; John Porter <[email protected]>; Simon Cozens <[email protected]>
Date: Saturday, August 04, 2001 02:46 PM
Subject: Re: Supercompiled Perl


>John Porter wrote:
>>Jordan Dimov wrote:
>>>Turchin has founded a start up (www.supercompilers.com) with the purpose 
>>>of developing a supercompiler for Java, speeding up Java code by a factor 
>>>of 100.
>>
>>The culture of Java encourages fantastic hyperbole.
>
>Simon Cozens wrote:
>>Jordan Dimov wrote:
>>>Is anyone here familiar with the concept of supercompilation, as 
>>>described by prof. Valentin Turchin in [1] for example?
>>>[...]
>>>[1] ``The Concept of a Supercompiler'', Valenting F. Turchin, ACM Trans. 
>>>Program. Lang. Syst. 8, 3 (Jul 1986), pp. 292-325
>>
>>I've read this.
>>[...]
>>This isn't anything new, since most compilers do this anyway.
>
>This must be a misunderstanding. As far as I understand modern 
>supercompilers are capable of transforming an interpreter into a compiler. 
>This seems to be just too revolutionary for most people to believe. The 
>speed-up factor of course depends on the kind of application. More 
>important is the idea to allow writing programs on a level of abstraction 
>which was not possible so far. Obviously there must be some hindrances for 
>the wide-spread use of this technology. Possibly the publicly available 
>tools only work on some advanced programming languages which aren't 
>understood by a lot of programmers, and may be they aren't very easy to 
>apply in ordinary practise.
>
>There are quite a few papers about the subject, some of which can be found 
>here:
>http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cs?q=supercompiler&submit=Search+Documents&am=50
>http://www.refal.com/english/s_compil.htm (home of supercompilation with 
>Refal, online examples)
>http://www.diku.dk/topps/bibliography/bibl-aut.html (search for 
>/supercompil(er)|(ation)/ yields lots of hits)
>http://www.diku.dk/users/rambo/publications.html (Master's Thesis with 
>detailed remarks about history)
>http://www.dina.dk/~jesper/PEsummerschool/ (educational implementation & 
>tutorial)
>http://www.dina.kvl.dk/~jesper/CASE/ (educational implementation, examples)
>
>>>Is Perl suitable for this kind of program transformation?
>>
>>Of course.
>
>Jordan, possibly this wasn't the best mailing list to ask questions about 
>that subject. You could have more luck when you direct them to the Refal 
>mailing list:
>
>mailto:[email protected]
>
>The archive can be browsed here:
>
>http://www.botik.ru/mail-archive/refal/
>
>(Most messages are in Russian, but questions which are posted in English 
>are also replied to in English. Also some of the Russian messages are 
>nearly understandable after applying online-translation. Watch out not to 
>execute the attachment Microsoft_Word__3_.doc.bat.)
>
>-- Helmut
>
>(BCCed to Valentin F. Turchin, Andrei V. Klimov, Andrei P. Nemytykh)
>
>
>________________________________
>
>Helmut Enck-Radana
>Paradigma Software GmbH
>http://www.paradigma-software.de
>________________________________
>
>