Re: Formally Defining a Programming Language

From	Christophe de Dinechin <christophe@taodyne.com>
Newsgroups	comp.compilers
Subject	Re: Formally Defining a Programming Language
Date	2011-11-22 20:45 -0800
Organization	Compilers Central
Message-ID	<11-11-047@comp.compilers> (permalink)
References	<11-11-039@comp.compilers>

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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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Formally Defining a Programming Language Seima Rao <seimarao@gmail.com> - 2011-11-19 19:15 +0530
  Re: Formally Defining a Programming Language Kaz Kylheku <kaz@kylheku.com> - 2011-11-21 17:16 +0000
    Re: Formally Defining a Programming Language "s_dubrovich@yahoo.com" <s_dubrovich@yahoo.com> - 2011-11-27 20:58 -0800
  Re: Formally Defining a Programming Language Christophe de Dinechin <christophe@taodyne.com> - 2011-11-22 20:45 -0800
  Re: Formally Defining a Programming Language federation2005@netzero.com - 2012-02-29 17:11 -0800
    Re: Formally Defining a Programming Language glen herrmannsfeldt <gah@ugcs.caltech.edu> - 2012-03-02 22:35 +0000

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