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From: "Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: ANN: Kickstarter for beginning work on a new open-source Compiler
Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2014 17:28:13 -0500
Organization: Jacob Sparre Andersen Research & Innovation
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Date: 2014-03-19T17:28:13-05:00
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"Shark8" <onewingedshark@gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:0d9343e9-6190-46b0-a313-bc33ed17f28d@googlegroups.com...
...
> But storing it as unprocessed text means that you [well, your
> computer/tools] have to repeat a lot of work (e.g. parsing) again and
> again. "Moving that processing to the outer loop" can reduce that, and
> given the advantages of working w/ meaningful-data vs. generalized-text
> it seems like a reasonable thing to do.

*Seems* reasonable, but actually is just premature optimization.

Computers have gotten amazingly fast these days -- a lot of the design 
decisions that we made with Janus/Ada to reduce compilation time and storage 
requirements don't do much today.

And remember that an IDE needs human-level response times. On a modern 
computer, one can do a heck of a lot in between keypresses or mouse 
movements. On top of that, parsing is relatively easy and cheap. Parsing is 
one of the cheaper phases of a compiler, and it's dubious that it would be 
worth a complex (and likely to be much more fragile) data structure in order 
to save that small amount of time. Especially with the other costs of going 
away from standard text representations.

                                 Randy.