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| vlad.dumitrescu at flashm |
 Posted: Tue Aug 03, 1999 8:07 pm |
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> > How does the thought of
> > using Erlang as a "assembler" language, most like Lisp (and C) are for
> > so many other higher-level languages, sound? Is it an heresy? hope
> > not...
>
> I'm not sure what you're getting at. You'd like to compile other
> languages into Erlang?
Something like that, yes. Not any language, but something more
like a kind of "Erlang++". Let me explain by taking an example:
constraint programming. One can express all constraints and rules
in Erlang, but if an application uses a lot of it, it might be easier to
use and debug if one could extend Erlang, and use a preprocessor
to convert the source into 'clean' Erlang.
One other example might have been the list comprehensions: if the
language did not provide them, someone might use a preprocessor
to 'compile' them into code.
In the latter case, including that into the language is good because
it is a general improvement and it's also faster than using hand-
coded routines. But when the change is specific, of limited use, I
think it makes little sense to include it into the language.
> Erlang is the most wonderfully concise and easy to use language I've had
> the pleasure of programming in.
I completely agree with you!!
My question was in fact addressed to the creators of Erlang. I
know that it might be a touchy question to (more or less) build a
language on top of another - and I don't want to get on their black
list!  So I ask first, to find out their thoughts.
note: it is constraint programming that I would like to be able to
express in a cleaner way.
/Vlad
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| klacke at bluetail.com |
| Posted: Tue Aug 03, 1999 9:11 pm |
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> in Erlang, but if an application uses a lot of it, it might be easier to
> use and debug if one could extend Erlang, and use a preprocessor
> to convert the source into 'clean' Erlang.
This is not a bad idea at all,
>
> One other example might have been the list comprehensions: if the
> language did not provide them, someone might use a preprocessor
> to 'compile' them into code.
>
And as it happens, list comprehensions are implemented that
way already. lib/compiler/src/sys_pre_expand.erl
This was easy to implement, the drawback is that lc's are
a bit slower that they could be.
> In the latter case, including that into the language is good because
> it is a general improvement and it's also faster than using hand-
> coded routines. But when the change is specific, of limited use, I
> think it makes little sense to include it into the language.
>
We used to discuss a sort of kernel erlang a couple of
years ago, it should a minimalistic language (possibly
imperative) that could be used to compile all kinds of
transformations and language extensions into. It was never
realized though but I still think it was a good idea.
Cheers
/klacke
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