At 09:06 PM 5/28/2003 -0300, you wrote:
>It is very, very strange. But an interesting experience - some of the 
>things the translation had trouble with turned out to be typos or badly 
>phrased in the original language. This gives me hope that a 
>multi-lingual Squeak with semi-automatic translation might work 
>reasonably well.

That's been my experience; half the battle of translation, whether verbal or written, is getting the source content cleaned up in the original language. If something is hard to translate, that is almost always red flag that it needs to be rewritten in the original language. My machine translation engine will start out as a spell checker, expand to grammar checking, and finally tackle composition before I expect it to be ready to tackle translation.

By the way, I am thinking of naming a language "bossa"; does that have any wierd connotations that I should know of? I picked it becuase I liked its translation to "style", as in "bossa nova", but I figure I should run the choice by a native speaker first.

>A little more on topic, after I finish my current machine I want to 
>implement the Squeak VM in Verilog on the Xess development board. I 
>wonder if I should do it 100% by hand or if the Slang translator could 
>be perverted to do part of the job. This is just a learning experience 
>and not a commercial project. I want to see how fast things can go with 
>no fancy tricks.

Don't know if you get Dr Dobbs Journal, but there was an interesting article a few months back on compiling C to FPGAs. They made a special "version" of C to pull the trick off, but ultimately I don't think that is necessary. The article is not online (unless you buy it) but you can see the abstract at
  http://www.ddj.com/articles/2003/0305/
  SA-C: Single Assignment C

The work described in the article was done under the auspices of the Cameron project at Colorado State University.
  http://www.cs.colostate.edu/cameron/

Good luck on your work. Keep us filled in on your progress.

david
--
David Farber
dfarber at numenor.com