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]).
~nex
________
[0]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoiconicity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metacircular_evaluation
Received on Tue Aug 15 2006 - 05:24:12 BST