A case against standards

[Francois-Rene Rideau]

On Tue, Nov 04, 2003 at 01:21:47AM +0200, Ilmari Heikkinen wrote:
> One way might be to have the compiler build two programs, the other the
> semantically sparse imperative binary and the other a program to map the
> binary to the source code. A debugger made for specifically the program.

Yes. That's exactly the kind of meta-level protocol
that I propose in my thesis. Actually, it's a bit more subtle than that,
since the "abstract interpreter" must map the *state* of the stopped
*and synchronized* process running the compiled program into the abstract
computation that has been declared. Synchronization being necessary because
compiled processes (especially in a concurrent setting) have a lot of
transient states that have no coherent abstract meaning (e.g. abstract
invariants can be locally broken by the concrete implementation;
that's the well-known atomicity problem in databases).

[ François-René ÐVB Rideau | Reflection&Cybernethics | http://fare.tunes.org ]
[  TUNES project for a Free Reflective Computing System  | http://tunes.org  ]
Keep things as simple as you can, but no simpler.
	-- Albert Einstein
s/things/explanation/ ; s/A.*Einstein/Occam/