Re: To get things started...

On Tue, 21 Nov 2000, David Grove wrote:

> If we were simply feeding it perl with a single syntax, we could get away
> with a "one call" scheme. But since we're dealing with almost certainly
> mutually exclusive syntax and semantics, it probably needs more
> information.

Perhaps the "one call" can take some arguements?  I suppose it would need
to know what kind of syntax to expect.

> Larry's desires for the language, we need multiple possible ways to input,
> and multiple possible ways to output, but internally we need that language
> agnostic thing.

Bytecode, right?

> I don't think so. In a compiler I don't believe that the intermediate step
> is there

It definitely is.  Few optimizations are possible without an intermediate
representation of some kind!

> , and I've never seen any compiler accept multiple input semantics

GCC - recently renamed the "Gnu Compiler Collection" for a reason!

> and multiple output (meaning binary, bytecode, java, c#) (okay, C++

This also not uncommon - you can look at cross-compilers as one example.
Java compilers that can produce bytecode and native code is another.

> Can somebody let me know if any of what I've said is relevant?

Highly relevent, but also somewhat "known".  I think you would be
interested in reading a good book on compiler design.  The dragon-book is
a perenial favorite, although there might be more up-to-date material
available these days.  At least, I hope there is!

-sam