On Tue, 2006-08-15 at 07:23 +0200, nex wrote:
> dave wrote:
> > For example, I've been playing around with a
> > script that converts lispy languages into dot graphs
> > [...] here is the graph representation of the program
> > itself
> Robert Shelton wrote:
> > I could be wrong, but is that effectively just a parse tree?
>
> You're not wrong, but it's still a graph representation of the program
> itself. You see, with lispy languages, the structure of the source code
> pretty much is the structure of the parse tree, is the structure of the
> compiled program code. (Not at the machine code level for most
> architectures, but at the VM or interpreter level.) This it's why it's
> trivial to write a Lisp interpreter in Lisp, but lots of work to write a
> C++ compiler in C++. (More specifically, the reason is Lisp's
> homoiconicity [0]).
ah, I'd never heard that word before, thanks.
fwiw I just realised the diagram is wrong, but you get the idea... this
topic came up before I had the chance to debug it :)
cheers,
dave
Received on Tue Aug 15 2006 - 10:00:55 BST