[Synopsis-devel] Re: source-to-source translators

[Eric M. Hopper]

On Thu, 2005-06-16 at 09:41 -0400, Stefan Seefeld wrote:
> Can you be a bit more specific about what kind of 'ideas' to draw from
> that ?

The C++ template language is really a language all unto itself, separate
from, but also intimately related to C++ proper.  It's a functional
programming language.  The template arguments are the function
parameters.  It's capable of creating C++ code at compile time by
reasoning about and re-arranging type information.

In a sense, it does source (C++) to source (C++ again) translation of
templates to working C++ code.

> We seem to be talking about two different languages now. You are referring
> to the programming language itself, while I'm talking about a language to
> express code transformations with, i.e. 'meta-programming'.

No, I was talking about the template mechanism and its relationship to C
++ as a whole.  In a sense, its a meta-programming language for C++.

I'm not sure how useful the ideas are for say, C++->Python translation.
But I think the example of C++ templates is still worth keeping in mind.

Have fun (if at all possible),
-- 
The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they
be properly armed.  -- Alexander Hamilton
-- Eric Hopper (hopper at omnifarious.org  http://www.omnifarious.org/~hopper) --
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