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000101_icon-group-sender _Wed May 17 07:42:23 2000.msg
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by baskerville.CS.Arizona.EDU (8.9.1a/8.9.1) id HAA00760
for icon-group-addresses; Wed, 17 May 2000 07:41:59 -0700 (MST)
Message-Id: <200005171441.HAA00760@baskerville.CS.Arizona.EDU>
From: espie@liafa.jussieu.fr (Marc Espie)
X-Newsgroups: comp.lang.icon
Subject: Re: Is Anyone Working On A Unicode Version Of Icon?
Date: 17 May 2000 09:45:59 GMT
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To: icon-group@optima.CS.Arizona.EDU
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In article <74qU4.790$to2.107064@carnaval.risq.qc.ca>,
Ian Trudel <ian.trudel@tr.cgocable.ca> wrote:
>As you write about C++, I don't see any point of it. Icon is implemented in
>C and C is available on a *lot* of platforms and works quite same (I've got
>a weird feeling "quite same", "quite same", [..]). You should not forget
>that the interface with generated code and Icon would probably be in C
>rather than C++ anyway. I think the standard translator should translate
>Icon to C, but nothing says there should not be a C++ translator available
>as well.
C++ is available on a lot of platforms. Find me a platform that doesn't
support a C++ compiler.
I've seen Icon runtime library, I know C, I know C++. I know that the
translation to C++ of quite a few concepts would be fairly direct (most
icon objects would just get a class, and handling polymorphism is not much
harder, especially with type deduction running along, since you don't always
need polymorphism). There are also fairly reasonable ways to `invert' Icon
concepts such as generators into fast C++ constructs.
My main concern with the icon-to-C compiler was size and speed: it's not
reasonable to use over a 3000 lines project which translate to >90000 lines
of C, which then proceeds to exceed 80MB of memory to compile...
At a guess, the corresponding translation to C++ would be 10 times smaller,
and much more easy to tweak. But then, this means having someone with free
time on their hands, and knowing C++...
As far as byte-code and the java analogy goes, I'm not convinced at all.
We already have a perfectly good working, somewhat slow, icon implementation.
What's the benefit of doing yet another slow implementation ?
--
Marc Espie
|anime, sf, juggling, unicycle, acrobatics, comics...
|AmigaOS, OpenBSD, C++, perl, Icon, PostScript...
| `real programmers don't die, they just get out of beta'