Bootstrapping language implementations without C

[Samuel Bronson]

On 15/05/05, David Hopwood <david.nospam.hopwood at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
> Samuel Bronson wrote:
> > On 5/9/05, Pupeno <pupeno at pupeno.com> wrote:
> >
> >>We may see the time when writing a static-language is no longer worth it,
> >>because the dynamic-language are so much better... and we might eventually
> >>see C die, leaving the field to newer languages... [snip!]
> >
> > However shall we compile our interpreters then?
> 
> Using MLRISC for example (http://www.cs.nyu.edu/leunga/www/MLRISC/Doc/html/).
> It is written in Standard ML, and compiles various high-level languages to
> various machine ISAs. It does not depend on C at all, only on the fact that
> some Standard ML implementation exists for some machine.

But then I would need to write in SML. This might not be too bad with
monads, which I hear are coming to some ML or other, but it might have
been the other, but even so the syntax seems rather odd. I also don't
know what I would do in a HM-based typesystem without type classes. In
any case, SML is staticly-typed. I suppose maybe C-- would do the job
well enough, though. Then again, I got stuck on parsing resends in my
effort at writing a Self implementation... One of these days I should
figure out how to get lexer-combinators that support lookahead.