Professor Tonneau,Is Pliant a writeable or readable language and is it easily translated?Thank you for your time. Eleanor

Message posted by maybe Hubert Tonneau on2007/03/07 12:02:52

What do you mean by writeable or readable ? 

Message posted by maybe Eleanor on2007/03/08 14:58:31

Professor Tonneau,Could you perhaps explain how Pliant performs the lexical analysis?  Iam doing a research project on your language.  As for the question about the readability andwriteability, I mean, how easy is it to read a written program in Pliant?  I would seemthat it would be not very readable because of the flexibilty and customizability ofthe program but that it would be more writeable because of this.  Is this true?And I also think that pliant is not an orthogonal language from what I've read.  Is this true?Thank you again for your time,Eleanor

Message posted by maybe Hubert Tonneau on2007/03/08 23:53:01

> Could you perhaps explain how Pliant performs the lexical analysis ? 

Also please remind to forget everything you know about grammars and automatonsbefore starting to read because Pliant parser is not based on these, evenif it's very unusual. 

> As for the question about the readability and> writeability, I mean, how easy is it to read a written program in Pliant?  I would seem> that it would be not very readable because of the flexibilty and customizability of> the program but that it would be more writeable because of this.  Is this true? 

Well, the more the programming language is powerfull, the ugliest the finalprogram might be if the programmer does not use it resonably. It's not at all specific to Pliant.  It's just a general fact of technology. 

Pliant customisability is not intended to change everything, but to enableto write full libraries. What I mean by full libraries in not just new data types and functions (or newclasses if you prefer object programming wording) but alsoso.  tiny extensions to the parser that make using the library easier.  new checking and rewriting rules that also make using the librarie easier, safer and more efficient

> And I also think that pliant is not an orthogonal language from what I've read.  Is this true? 

Please elaborate on what makes you think it's not orthogonal. I might not understand properly what you mean by orthogonal. 

If I remember well the general meaning of orthogonal in programming languagestheories, that I would say Pliant is very orthogonal because at compiler level,everything is an expression. 

PS: I'm not a professor.  I earn my living through a job in the industry.  Pliant is my personnal project, and I just have very good relations with the CAMS research laboratry. 

Message posted by maybe Eleanor on2007/03/13 10:51:45

Thank you for the lengthy answer.  It was very helpful!About the lexical analysis, I read the information on the link you gave me but I still have not been able to understand what process Pliant goes through to break up the source code into tokens.  Thank you so much for your time and I'm sorryfor the repetative questions. Eleanor

Message posted by maybe Hubert Tonneau on2007/03/13 11:01:13

We just call an ordered set of filters. A filter either fails, or pushes a parsed token and moves the cursor forward. 

See 'parse_float' function in /pliant/language/type/number/float.pli as anexample. 

Message posted by maybe Eleanor on2007/03/13 11:32:21

Since you asked what I meant by orthogonality here are a few guidelines I have learned about that make a programming language orthogonal: Cleanly integrated features: All features must be cleanly and elegantly integrated into the language. Composability of features: It must be possible to use combination of features to achieve solutions that wouldotherwise have required extra separate features.  Avoid special purpose features: There should be as few spurious and "special purpose" features as possible.  Performance independence: A feature should be such that its implementation does not impose significant overheads on programs that do not require it.  Understatement independence: A user need only know about the subset of the language explicitly used to write the program.  That is, new features should not have their semantics influence that of old features. 

Also, is Pliant easily translatable where the key of easy translation is regularity of syntactic structure? 

Thank you! 

Message posted by maybe Eleanor on2007/03/18 12:25:31

Mr. Tonneau,Have you had the opportunity to see my message?  I'd appreciate an answer when you have the chance!Thank you! 

Message posted by maybe Hubert Tonneau on2007/03/18 17:02:37

Your criterians are very general, so a full answer would require much more thanI intend to write here. 

Here are three remarks:

I tend to think that a language value is more than anything else in the width ofthe usage field it's not too bad for.  Having many good properties does not worthmuch if for your application just one bad one makes it a nightmare. 

About your 'performance independence' criterian: Having all memory modelsavailable in a single language is fairly hard from the technical point of view. High level languages tend to favor garbadge collector (automatic free handling)but it's not without performances impact on programs that don't really need it. On the other hand, manual freeing (C++) or manual + references count (Pliant)does not bring performances constrain, but will make somme applications muchharder to write.  So, there is no definitive answer to the memory allocationquestion. 

The last remark is about translating Pliant. Pliant key feature from the very high level point of view is that it states thatcompiling is binding a set of instructions (procedural low level programming)to an expression (high level declarative programming) and that any libraryor application must be abble to decide how to do that in it's peticular field(meta programming).Since the hardware is always procedural, previously to Pliant, languageswhere either low level procedural oriented (Pascal, C, C++) so had a straightand efficient translation to executable code but where inexpressive, or wherehigher level (LISP, CAML, Prolog) and had a long and complex fixed built intransition mechanism and as a result where inefficient in all but the veryfiew fields where the built in transition engine was optimal. So, the problem when translating from Pliant to another language is not at allthe orthogonality or something like that, but first the memory model becauseas previously stated translating from one memory to another cannot be doneautomatically, and second the lack of the Pliant 'meta' programming notionin other languages.