home
***
CD-ROM
|
disk
|
FTP
|
other
***
search
/
ftp.cs.arizona.edu
/
ftp.cs.arizona.edu.tar
/
ftp.cs.arizona.edu
/
icon
/
newsgrp
/
group00b.txt
/
000064_icon-group-sender _Tue Oct 3 16:52:03 2000.msg
< prev
next >
Wrap
Internet Message Format
|
2001-01-03
|
2KB
Return-Path: <icon-group-sender>
Received: (from root@localhost)
by baskerville.CS.Arizona.EDU (8.9.1a/8.9.1) id QAA17480
for icon-group-addresses; Tue, 3 Oct 2000 16:50:10 -0700 (MST)
Message-Id: <200010032350.QAA17480@baskerville.CS.Arizona.EDU>
To: rohan@micom.asn.au
Cc: D De Villiers <ddevilliers@lando.co.za>, icon-group@optima.CS.Arizona.EDU
Subject: Re: Icon for Palm ?
Date: Tue, 03 Oct 2000 14:47:35 -0700
From: Clinton L Jeffery <jeffery@imperial.egr.unlv.edu>
Errors-To: icon-group-errors@optima.CS.Arizona.EDU
Status: RO
Content-Length: 1453
rohan> Has an Icon compiler for any processor under any OS ever existed?
Although you may make a big distinction in your head between a compiler
that generates native machine code directly, and a compiler that generates
C code that compiles to native machine code, this distinction is artificial.
A native code "compiler" by your definition would typically still generate
a machine-independent intermediate code from which it would do native code
instruction selection; so what if C is the intermediate code? If you want
something better than the Icon (-> C) compiler, you want either a faster
compiler, faster or smaller generated code, or perhaps a compiler that has
no bugs. All desirable traits, and none of which are precluded by using
a C compiler as one's "native code generator".
As has been noted from time to time, for a very high level language like
Icon, much of the time is spent in the runtime system routines, so a native
code compiler does not offer as big an advantage over a virtual machine as
it does for a low level language like C, Pascal, or Java. But that doesn't
mean everyone on this list would not love to have a superoptimized Icon
compiler for their work. :-)
I am looking for someone to port Ken Walker's Icon compiler to MS Windows,
using a freely available C compiler such as gcc or lcc as its code generator.
If anyone wants to work on this I'd be glad to provide technical assistance.
Clint jeffery@cs.unlv.edu