At 11:53 AM 2/23/2002 +0000, Simon Cozens wrote: >I was very lucky recently to attend a talk by Ganesh Sittampalam >introducing Microsoft .NET and the Common Language Runtime. A lot of >what CLR is trying to do is quite similar to what we're doing with >Parrot, so I thought it would be a good idea to briefly recap what's >going on with CLR.
I've read several specs on CLR and ILAsm; there are some good ideas. <rant> I wouldn't want Parrot to look like ILA but I wish we would at least have more dialogue on things like pbc format, adding directives to the language, etc. One of the toys I have in my box is a proof of concept compiler (from all my copious spare time of course) but lately its become apparent that we should give the "language" some attention. We need notation for globals, notation for metadata about objects and types, etc. etc. but frankly the last time I looked at the assembler I sort of got lost. As well, there is no searchable archive so I'm not even sure what dialogue went on about what Parrot 1.0 is even supposed to look like. As well, I think a "spec" should exist for where we are going with the assembly syntax (directives, etc) because there are plenty of good examples, just like the ones you cited, for us to draw from. To start things off I'd like to propose to very basic directives. One for setting the entrypoint of the file. ..entry or .start ? Something for storing metadata about the "compiler" that generated the assembler, maybe a .parrot directive? ..parrot [1.0, "Perl6 compiler generated"] I think these are relatively easy to add; and while we are on the subject, is there a proposed "directive" syntax? The dot syntax is easy to parse fwiw. There are several others that would improve readability of Parrot such as .sub | .method (just be a label for now). </rant> -Melvin
