Path: csiph.com!1.us.feeder.erje.net!feeder.erje.net!border1.nntp.dca1.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!news.iecc.com!.POSTED.news.iecc.com!nerds-end From: Roger L Costello Newsgroups: comp.compilers Subject: What programming languages are simply abstractions on top of another programming language? Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2022 19:42:55 +0000 Organization: Compilers Central Lines: 13 Sender: news@iecc.com Approved: comp.compilers@iecc.com Message-ID: <22-06-047@comp.compilers> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Injection-Info: gal.iecc.com; posting-host="news.iecc.com:2001:470:1f07:1126:0:676f:7373:6970"; logging-data="24846"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@iecc.com" Keywords: design, macros, comment Posted-Date: 20 Jun 2022 18:06:43 EDT X-submission-address: compilers@iecc.com X-moderator-address: compilers-request@iecc.com X-FAQ-and-archives: http://compilers.iecc.com Accept-Language: en-US Content-Language: en-US Xref: csiph.com comp.compilers:3076 Hi Folks, I am reading "Software Tools" by Kernighan and Plauger. One of the things that I've learned is that Ratfor is a simple abstraction on top of Fortran. For example, Ratfor provides a while loop. The while loop can be mechanically converted to Fortran if-then and goto statements. Really cool! That got me to wondering, "What other programming languages are simply abstractions on top of an existing programming language?" /Roger [The infamous m4 macrogenerator is used to build what are in effect new languages like the sendmail configuration and GNU Autoconf. -John]