[virtmach] First VM

[Francois-Rene Rideau]

On Tue, Nov 14, 2000 at 02:22:14PM +1100, Michael Wolf wrote:
> [...] You could automatically generate all of this
> stuff all at once when you build Chip. [...]
> 
> I would probably do this in perl, and I've heard m4 is suitable for this
> sort of thing, but I don't know m4, so take that advice with a grain of
> salt.  :)

Having done similar things in m4, I can but disrecommend it.
m4 makes simple things simple, so at first you're quite satisfied,
but as they get more complicated, it quickly becomes _hell_ to manage,
until you realize you've been reimplementing a full-fledged programming
language on top of m4. Choose a real language right away, be it
OCaml, Common LISP, Perl, Scheme, FORTH, or whatever.

Yours freely,

[ François-René ÐVB Rideau | Reflection&Cybernethics | http://fare.tunes.org ]
[  TUNES project for a Free Reflective Computing System  | http://tunes.org  ]
Ob(Pure Programming Languages): implicit state _is_ modularity.
If we want to be really radical, and eliminate implicit state,
then we should eliminate it at the meta-level, too,
and remove named variables, leaving us only combinators.
(\Pi (S (K \Pi) (S (S (K S) (S (K K) (S (K P) I))) (S (S (K S)
(S (K (S (K P))) (S (S (K S) (S (K K) (S (K P) I))) (K I)))) (K I)))))