On 22/04/2018 16:27, Martin Gregorie wrote:
> On Sun, 22 Apr 2018 15:30:50 +0100, Gareth's Downstairs Computer wrote:
>
>> It's also something with pitfalls, for, if editing into the compiled
>> code may take several steps in different parts of the source which would
>> be incompatible with each other and hence cause a compilation error!
>>
> Thats exactly why it may be a good idea to bear the edit requirements in
> mind when designing the language.
>
> For instance a design using line numbers and single line statements
> should be fairly bulletproof even for incremental compilation, especially
> if line numbers automatically control statement sequence (unlike some
> BASICS!) and each statement corresponds to a chunk of position-
> independent code thats independent of the code in adjacent statements,
> but a block-structured language probably can't be made to work that way.
> As others have said, if this is the way you'd want to language to work,
> it suggests quite strongly that automatic variable creation combined with
> BASIC or Perl-like variable type annotation would be useful.
>
>

The sort of difficulties that I had in mind were changing the number
of parameters passed to a procedure / function / subroutine when there
are already commpiled calls to it with the wrong number; or possibly
changing the definition of a record or structure, again with compiled
references already existing.

Perhaps there are some changes, particularly those changing the numbers
of parameter or structure members that call for complete source
reconstruction and recompilation.

Not thought everything through yet, so may be some inconsistencies in
the above.

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