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Re: intralingua


From: John W. Eaton
Subject: Re: intralingua
Date: Tue, 8 Nov 2005 15:11:44 -0500

On  8-Nov-2005, Paul Kienzle wrote:

| The alternative approach is to target a common underlying object system 
| for all the languages that you are using.  With introspection you can 
| make the compiled R methods directly available to Octave.  You can then 
| install the compiled R modules and make them available directly to 
| Octave.  Since they are compiled, you do not need the R interpreter 
| available to use them.  More importantly, once somebody does the work 
| of wrapping e.g., the multivariate normal distribution functions in R, 
| they are immediately available in Python and Octave.

Octave has a large run-time library written in a mixture of C++, C,
and Fortran (plus the scripting language code).  The run-time library
handles type dispatching for operators at run time.  How does this
work with something like Mono?  Can you link to the existing run-time
libraries, or do they have to be rewritten for the virtual machine?
Do variables in Octave live in its run-time system or in the Mono
interpreter (or does that question even make sense)?

Currently, Octave's parser and run-time are not completely separate,
and the interpreter runs by walking the parse tree.  Generating code
for some other kind of virtual machine from the parse tree should be
possible, but will require some work.

I agree that the best path for hooking scripting languages together is
a common virtual machine rather than a collection of bi-directional
links for each pair of languages.  I think RMS proposed Guile for this
purpose about 11 years ago, but there has never been sufficient
momentum behind Guile to really get things going, and as far as I
know, there has never been a successful translator for any language
that targets Guile.

Are the efforts for other languages closely linked with the core
languages?  How are updates to the Python internals (for example)
tracked by the project that implements Python for .Net?  Are they
implementing their own system from scratch?  How will the systems stay
in sync?

For real success, I think these projects must be closely integrated,
otherwise code that will work in the standalone system could fail
or produce different results in the Mono/.Net system.

jwe



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