Re: Ada platforms and pricing, was: Re: a new language, designed for safety !

[Natasha Kerensikova <lithiumcat@instinctive.eu>]

On 2014-06-18, Dmitry A. Kazakov <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> wrote:
> On Wed, 18 Jun 2014 17:34:35 +0000 (UTC), Natasha Kerensikova wrote:
>
>> For some reason I'm much more frightened by parsing Ada text than by
>> code generation. I know the latter is probably not easier than the
>> former (I'm aware of LLVM vs nested functions), but who said fright is
>> rational?
>
> Oh, but parsing is really simple thing. You do recursive descent all the
> time. Except for expressions. For expressions you could take this:
>
> http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de/ada/components.htm#12.9

Maybe it's a vocabulary issue, but it's not the part where tokens are
carved out of input text that frighten me, but rather the first level of
interpretation: what entity is that word referring to? More
specifically, dealing with use clauses, prefix notations, overloading,
and stuff like that.

Am I mistaken in assuming an ASIS  provider takes care of that part as
well?

> Semantic analysis is a hell. Code generation, optimization is a hell within
> hell, IMO.

To clarify, I'm currently only contemplating doing the simplest
ASIS-to-LLVM-intermediate-form translator.

That means no optimization (other than what LLVM can do downstream), no
machine code generation (again other than LLVM provides), no useful
syntax error message, probably no syntax error messages at all for a
while (I'm not even sure how to deal with detecting whether a source is
legal or not), no runtime system, and no standard library.

Now I can still be talked out of this, but pointing out difficulties
outside of the scope of the draft project is not a good deterrent.

You could however point how useless it would be, so you might want to
consider it a milestone rather than a project then.


Natasha