Re: Formally Defining a Programming Language

Christophe de Dinechin <christophe@taodyne.com>
Tue, 22 Nov 2011 20:45:45 -0800 (PST)

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Related articles
Formally Defining a Programming Language seimarao@gmail.com (Seima Rao) (2011-11-19)
Re: Formally Defining a Programming Language kaz@kylheku.com (Kaz Kylheku) (2011-11-21)
Re: Formally Defining a Programming Language christophe@taodyne.com (Christophe de Dinechin) (2011-11-22)
Re: Formally Defining a Programming Language s_dubrovich@yahoo.com (s_dubrovich@yahoo.com) (2011-11-27)
Re: Formally Defining a Programming Language federation2005@netzero.com (2012-02-29)
Re: Formally Defining a Programming Language gah@ugcs.caltech.edu (glen herrmannsfeldt) (2012-03-02)
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From: Christophe de Dinechin <christophe@taodyne.com>
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2011 20:45:45 -0800 (PST)
Organization: Compilers Central
References: 11-11-039
Keywords: parse, theory
Posted-Date: 25 Nov 2011 22:13:36 EST

On Nov 19, 2:45 pm, Seima Rao <seima...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> n designing my own Programming Language and given the existence
> of a lot of programming languages and an infinity of "knowhows" that
> is the Internet, I resorted to adhoc adaptation methods that worked
> incredibly well!


I'd like to share a few thoughts here, based on my experience with XL
(http://xlr.sf.net):


- Don't design a language today based on 30-years-old templates. XL
demonstrates that you can create a working, readable language with
user-extensible syntax using a recursive descent parser which is less
than 2000 lines of commented C++.


- Keep it simple. The C++ specification weights hundreds of pages, and
it's full of bugs and ambiguities. XL can be explained in twenty pages
or so, see http://xlr.sourceforge.net/sites/default/files/XLRef.pdf.


- Consider its applications, the ecosystem. Think about the library,
about meta-programming, about domain-specific languages, about IDE
integration (Eclipse, vi or emacs).




> Can readers of this forum help direct to relevant materials wrt
> Formalism that I can study to learn about Formalisms that will help in
> deciding about my Programming Language?


I assume you know about the Dragon Book (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Dragon_Book)?


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