RE: [Caml-list] partial eval question

[Walid Taha <taha@cs.rice.edu>]

Hi Jacques,

Please see my last email in responce to Ben's original email.  MSP in 
MetaOCaml doesn't require any "contortions".

Walid.

On Mon, 27 Oct 2003, Jacques Carette wrote:

|> If you really want more control over code generation (not forgetting
|> that just writing out what you want by hand is often the simplest
|> option in practice!) then I think C++ templates are a dead end---far
|> better to make the object language the same as the target language,
|> as in MetaOcaml and similar.
|
|If you know what you want, MetaOcaml is great.  If you are
|prototyping/experimenting, then a typeless symbolic language (like Scheme or
|Maple) give you much greater flexibility.  MetaOcaml's contortions to get
|something like:
|
|> pow := proc(x,n::nonnegint) if n=0 then 1 else times(x,pow(x,n-1)) end if
|end proc;
|pow := proc(x, n::nonnegint)
|    if n = 0 then 1 else times(x, pow(x, n - 1)) end if
|end proc
|
|> unapply(pow(x,5), x);
|       x -> times(x, times(x, times(x, times(x, times(x, 1)))))
|
|is really quite burdensome.  Having the freedom of dealing with 'open' terms
|as first-class citizens is really very powerful, if somewhat dangerous.
|
|I have found Thiemann's PGG as the 'front end', coupled with
|Scheme-to-YourFavoriteLanguage translation to be quite effective PE
|strategy, at least when more basic 'symbolic computation' is not enough.
|
|Jacques
|
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