the informal ramblings of a formal language researcher

Wednesday, August 10, 2005

rules for intermediate representations

And the muse of compiler development did rise from her murky swamp, and did say unto the Larceny developers, "Thou shalt not convert your aye-arrh into object form, be it string, bytecode, or otherwise, until the last possible moment."

The Larceny developers did take exception to this rule, pleading "but we have chosen an invertible object form, from which the most exhalted client developer may extract the original structured aye-arrh. Its strings are formatted thusly, isomorphic to the structure of the input, and thus less painful for my mortal eyes to gaze upon than the radiance of the aye-arrh structure itself."

To this, the muse of compiler development rules responds, "verily, you might take such a path; but then you must also provide such inversion functions, and not place the onus of developing such functions upon the shoulders of the most exhalted client developer, who is already fed up with trying to make sense of your underspecified and confusingly named interfaces.

Here endeth the lesson.

No comments:

Followers