4 ms·
A few years back, Dr. Dobb’s posted a pretty great series of articles on some of the techniques RBK Dewar employed when building the original SPITBOL compiler:
by jopamer 11y ago
A few years back, Dr. Dobb’s posted a pretty great series of articles on some of the techniques RBK Dewar employed when building the original SPITBOL compiler: http://www.drdobbs.com/cpp/some-programs-are-poorly-designed-on-pur/232300070 http://www.drdobbs.com/cpp/some-programs-are-poorly-designed...
(I was lucky enough to study compilers under Prof. Dewar when I was a grad student at NYU - I still have my notes on SPITBOL’s architecture, somewhere…)
- jallmann 11y agoExcellent article, very clever optimizations given the tradeoffs. From the article: > We were talking about students' tendency to let the compiler substitute for thinking This is actually why I use OCaml. Not going to comment on whether useful error messages are a detriment to pedagogy, but offloading thinking to the compiler is a lifesaver.
- mercurial 11y agoDefinitely. It doesn't prevent, say, off-by-one errors (and in general, errors when you manipulate several items of the same type), but if you structure your program correctly, you can be very confident about your code. Though OCaml's errors are not always the most explicit or nicely written.