[Axiom-developer] Re: Two stage compiler

[Martin Baker]

On Saturday 13 Nov 2010 15:55:08 you wrote:
>   Martin,
> 
> The Spad language is converted into an intermediate lisp
> representations of the form (DEF ... ) and then turned
> into optimized lisp programs and then turned into C and
> then compiled.
> 
> Tim

Tim,

Thanks very much for the reply.

I somehow got the impression (possibly from daase.lisp.pamphlet I can't 
remember now) that the SPAD compiler and the interpreter were both driven from 
the database files: (interp.daase, operation.daase, category.daase, 
compress.daase, browse.daase) and that this involved a lot of custom code 
(different for the compiler and interpreter) written in a mixture of Lisp and 
'boot' code. Have I got this wrong?

It just seemed to me that if, the pattern matching could be separated out 
(still driven from the tables), then the rest (Lex, Parse, Semantic Analysis 
and so on) could be done by standard tools like ANTLR.

As I have mentioned before I would really like better error messages and 
programming environment and it seemed to me that this might help with this? I 
also thought thought it might help you if it made the code more maintainable? 
But, of course, I don't understand all the practical issues that might stop 
this working.

Martin Baker