#: 9051 S12/OS9/68000 (OSK)
    06-Jan-91  21:12:31
Sb: #9050-68000 ASM Language
Fm: Jack Crenshaw 72325,1327
To: Jack Crenshaw 72325,1327 (X)

[Continued]

All of this touches on some very deep issues of philosophy, about which I have
some rather firm convictions (surprise!)

First of all, I like to program in assembly language.  Despite the general
feeling that it's a MUCH more difficult medium to program in, I find that it's
not that much harder than a HOL, _IF_ you have good tools (including macro
facilities), a well-equipped subroutine library, and some well-defined
conventions for things like parameter passing.  With my preprocessor, you get a
lot of the advantages of a HOL with no loss in efficiency.

On the other hand, I've also become convinced, by personal experience, that
writing a full-blown compiler is also very easy, _IF_ you don't care much about
the quality of the code output.

The trick is to combine both ideas into one program.  The ideal language would
be one in which you could write either way:  Quick and dirty programs in a
BASIC-like language, and to heck with tight code, or carefully tailored code
approaching or equalling the efficiency of assembler, for those cases where
it's needed.  But writing a single language capable of doing this would seem to
be a big challenge.  Certainly it's one that people like Kernighan or Wirth
haven't tried to tackle.

Rather than trying to bite that huge bullet in one swallow, I'd prefer to start
with something more modest and sneak up on the rest.

Jack