[Haskell-cafe] Aim Of Haskell

Steve Downey sdowney at gmail.com
Fri Dec 15 08:49:22 EST 2006


The front end for the comeau compiler is from Edison Design Group, and
that's the one that is used by many other compilers. And the EDG
compiler is regarded as being the most conformant.
Besides MS and the FSF (visual c++ and gcc), both Sun and IBM have c++
compiler toolchains not based on EDG. If they were, my life would be
much simpler.
The late additions of the STL, and some concommitant changes to how
templates worked, really caused a lot of the difficulties in
implementation. That, and the installed base problem.
Having version N of a language change the meaning of programs
targetting version N-1 tends to upset users.
The STL, however, brings a very applicative programming model into an
otherwise imperative language. And, it turns out that the template
language is a turing complete pure functional language, making
possible some very interesting type based metaprogramming. Of course,
since it wasn't really designed as such, it has to be heavily sugared
to be useful.

On 12/14/06, Bulat Ziganshin <bulat.ziganshin at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello Tomasz,
>
> Thursday, December 14, 2006, 11:32:33 PM, you wrote:
>
> > complete compilers. Two years ago the only full compiler for C++ was
> > Comeau, probably unknown to most C++ programmers. I am not sure about
> > today, but I wouldn't bet that things improved.
>
> just because they don't know what sits at back of their compiler? :)
>
> someone tells me, that only 2.5 front-ends remain - comeau, gcc and
> probably MS. all other compilers use comeau, which is not full compiler but
> just front-end
>
> there is old joke that camel is a horse created by committee. Algol-68,
> Pl/1, Ada and now C++ becomes such large languages that no one can master
> them in full details
>
>
> --
> Best regards,
>  Bulat                            mailto:Bulat.Ziganshin at gmail.com
>
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