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I tend to agree with you in principle, but for me too, a lot of high-level features are better understood in term of translations. Objects, coroutine, closures.

I tend to agree with you in principle, but for me too, a lot of high-level features are better understood in term of translations. Objects, coroutine, closures... Even in formal CS, it's common to define the semantics of a language by translation, which can give more hindsight than operational semantics. Now that I think of it, I think the problem is that most languages are defined informally which can be imprecise and inadequate. The translation provided by the compiler is the closest thing we have to a formal semantics, it's natural to rely on it.

professoretc 5y ago
> The translation provided by the compiler is the closest thing we have to a formal semantics, it's natural to rely on it. Which translation, though? Depending on your compiler flags, you may get very different translations, sometimes (if your program contains undefined behavior) even with dramatically different runtime effects.
WalterBright 5y ago
I've found that C compiler documentation on how their extensions work to be woefully inadequate. The only way to figure it out is to compile and examine the output. Most of the time, the implementors can't even be bothered to provide a grammar for their extensions.