Arc Forumnew | comments | leaders | submitlogin
PG quote about Arc: New type of compiler?
10 points by schtog 5778 days ago | 2 comments
http://lemonodor.com/archives/001091.html#c8508

I've been thinking of getting my shit together and collecting a bunch of people to work on Arc with me this summer. The problem is that I'm developing the language in a rather ambitious/stupid way, and there are bits I just don't have the expertise to do. Anyone out there interested in working on a radically new sort of compiler? Posted by: Paul Graham on March 11, 2005 07:53 AM

Might one ask what this new type of compiler is about? Is it used now? Are you working on it PG?



7 points by pg 5757 days ago | link

This was an earlier experiment that didn't work. Or at least, that I gave up on. The plan was to write a maximally brief (and thus horribly inefficient) meta-circular interpreter, and generate the compiler from it. So you'd literally have the metacircular interpreter as a sort of executable language spec.

I still believe this could be done, but it would be a dissertation's worth of work.

After I gave up on that, Rtm and I decided one summer to just hack together something that compiled into Scheme, and that's what's generating the page that you're reading.

-----

5 points by lojic 5777 days ago | link

Regarding the "new type of compiler", I took that to simply be referring to Arc.

Regarding whether he's working on it, I think the following quote from the link above is still applicable :(

"As for Arc, the problem is that I have only one life."

-----