Re: Studying and Maintaining GNAT, Is There Any Interest in a New Group?

[Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid>]

Luke A. Guest <laguest@archeia.com> writes:
> I have the C version of that book, bought before I got into Ada. I can see
> how FP languages help in the construction of the front end of a compiler,
> but forcing FP on the rest of the compiler where you’re not doing tree
> walking, I’m not so sure.

It wouldn't have occurred to me that any "forcing" would be involved,
since the approach seems very natural.  Past the front end there are
usually a bunch of IR rewriting passes, and sometimes multiple IR's
involving translation steps.  Then at the end there is instruction
selection, which in the book is done by tree pattern recognition (other
approaches are also possible).

This paper was pretty impressive, about cleaning up a compilation phase
by replacing a traditional data structure with a functional one:

https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/pubs/zipcfg.pdf

I think I've linked it before, so you may have seen it already.