On 6/5/06, Gabriel Dos Reis <address@hidden> wrote:
On Mon, 5 Jun 2006, Martin Rubey wrote:
| Gabriel Dos Reis <address@hidden> writes:
|
| > Also, I have been looking for the a formal grammar description of SPAD.
| > Where can I find it? The AXIOM book seems silent about it....
|
| Forget about SPAD, go for Aldor.
The source code of the Aldor compiler is not available; SPAD's is. I
heard there are talks tomove on that front, but how long we have to wait.
I cannot tell my students to wait till next year or so.
Yes, of course I can initiate a mini project where where they will
build an Aldor-like translator, but I rather have them start with a
base code and add transformations or type system convenient features.
My personal experience with SPAD was quite painful, dumping pages of sexp as error message for example.
I am developing my holonomic packages in Aldor with libAxiom and even if there is still some rough edges the experience is more enjoyable.
The documentation is way better, the compiler as better error message functionality.
I think the type system need a more formal description, I will like better inferencing, but as the type system is very complex I am not sure this can be done soundly.
My CS grad student two cents will go that is better to focus your effort on Aldor.
I am not sure on how, bringing SPAD up to speed ? A new implementation of Aldor, maybe just an interpreter ?
I think implementing an Aldor interpreter in one of the ML should be fairly doable and will be an interesting project due to it's type system( I have no experience implementing interpreter/compiler in Lisp)
Regards,
Antoine Hersen