We're out of tree codes; now what?

[Tarmo Pikaro <tapika at yahoo dot com>]

> One advantage of most computer languages (with the arguable exception of 
> C, but even it has preprocessor macros) is that they provide high-level 
> constructs that make it easier to write programs.

Constructors and destructors are quite simple functions which are 
executed at particular time. You could code constructs and destructs in C 
if you would like to do it. Have you seen symbian's two-pass constructs ?
You may think that yes, constructs are the essence of programming, 
but in fact they are not. More important is 1. clear, self-descriptive terminology
2. testing 3. dependency tracking (which source depends on which)

1 allows more fluent communication between programmers (and not only programmers)
2 allows to make programs which actually work. 3 improves reusability. 
(Which is currently does not exist in block box form - most of code is 
copy pasted from one place to another - white box reuse.)

> I believe that many 
> of these high-level constructs are reduced to more verbose lower-level 
> constructs in some of the language front ends (I know that this is true 
> in Fortran; I'm not as sure about other front ends), which means that 
> programming in Generic will require programming at a much lower level. 

How to present a program in visual form so it would be easy to 
understand and edit is another question. I have seen programs written
in C++ which were not working at all, and I have seen a programs written in
pure C - which were properly tested and worked faster than C++ analogues.
(And gcc is one of the examples which is written in C)
Sometime high level becomes too "high". Just try to read XML standards
- they are suffering from overabstraction and not bound to any 
particular / real problem.

> I don't think your expected advantages to editing the compiler's 
> representation directly will counteract that disadvantage.

If I edit assembler code - of course I will not benefit from it. But 
it must not be assembler code - it must be as close for human 
to understand and as simple to edit/modify as possible.
 
--
Have a nice day!
Tarmo.


 
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