XL (programming language): Difference between revisions

Revision as of 14:22, 1 October 2006

Revision as of 00:00, 16 October 2006

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Historically, the XL compiler was written in C++. It had achieved a point where most of the features described above worked correctly, but writing plug-ins was a nightmare, because C++ itself is not extensible, so implementing <code>translate</code>-like statements was impossible. The parse tree was more complicated, with dozens of node types, because it was designed for cross-language support. Moka was a Java-to-Java extensible compiler using the same infrastructure.

Abandoning the cross-language objectives and complex parse-tree structure, a complete rewrite of the compiler was started in 2003. The parse tree was vastly simplified down to the 7 XL0 nodes types now in use. This new compiler [[BootstrapBootstrapping (compilers)|bootstrapped]] in 2004, and all new development is now written in XL. However, this new compiler still has very incomplete XL1 support. Support for generic types is notably deficient.

=== Ancestry ===