A vision for Parrot

[Carel Fellinger]

On Wed, Nov 06, 2002 at 09:07:57AM +0000, Robin Becker wrote:
...
> Isn't it a commonplace that the n x m translation problem is best solved
> by having a common intermediate? This seems more efficient when 

Yep, it is a commonplace, but that doesn't make it true:)

You see, for the common constructs this might be true, but each
language has it weird corners and for those you'll end up with
language pair specific translations inside the intermediate language,
i.e. if there *is* such a translation. There will always be some left
overs that can't be (easily) translated.  e.g. suppose one of the
languages support continuations, but the others don't, bad luck.

Ofcourse for parrot this isn't a show stopper per see, as parrot
doesn't have to translate into each of the supported languages, it
just has to understand them.  But still, parrot will have to support
all the dark corners of all supported languages, quite a mess me thinks.

-- 
groetjes, carel