From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-0.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,FORGED_GMAIL_RCVD, FREEMAIL_FROM autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 Path: border2.nntp.ams3.giganews.com!backlog4.nntp.ams3.giganews.com!backlog4.nntp.ams.giganews.com!border2.nntp.ams.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!feeder2-2.proxad.net!proxad.net!feeder1-2.proxad.net!news.glorb.com!peer01.iad.highwinds-media.com!news.highwinds-media.com!feed-me.highwinds-media.com!post01.iad.highwinds-media.com!fx12.iad.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Shark8 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/31.0a1 MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: ANN: Kickstarter for beginning work on a new open-source Compiler References: <5151491a-14c3-4138-bcb5-f29108aeefb9@googlegroups.com> <857g7q6za4.fsf@stephe-leake.org> <0d9343e9-6190-46b0-a313-bc33ed17f28d@googlegroups.com> In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: X-Complaints-To: abuse@teranews.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Thu, 20 Mar 2014 16:53:43 UTC Organization: TeraNews.com Date: Thu, 20 Mar 2014 10:55:39 -0700 X-Received-Bytes: 3152 X-Received-Body-CRC: 1748168116 X-Original-Bytes: 3391 Xref: number.nntp.dca.giganews.com comp.lang.ada:185226 Date: 2014-03-20T10:55:39-07:00 List-Id: On 19-Mar-14 15:28, Randy Brukardt wrote: > "Shark8" 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. Fair points; but it still seems wrongheaded to treat the program-source as mere text unless absolutely needed. As someone said, text is the lowest common denominator... which is an absolutely stupid restriction when it comes to talking about tools; if everybody stuck to that ideology we'd all have vi or Notepad as our "standard programming editor". Freeing the tools from the concerns of text (and files/filesystems) so they can concentrate on the job they're supposed to be doing is also one of the points I mention... this applies to programmers, too. (If you hate the company's officially approved style, there should be no reason whatsoever that the editor couldn't automatically translate between your preferred and the company's official style; if you're storing the code as an AST [or similar] then you have to handle that transition (txt->AST, AST->txt) anyway.... and switching styles should have no impact as "changes" in the Version-control system.)