Fishing for a CS Masters Thesis Topic

sig siguctua at gmail.com
Thu Jun 21 19:29:09 UTC 2007


another great limitation of C, like in other strictly typed languages,
is inability to construct a calls to a dynamically prototyped function
at runtime and lack of of type info.
Even templates in C++ doesn't solve this problem - you still need to
know all the types of function parameters at compile time, and there's
no ways to construct and call them at runtime.


On 20/06/07, J J <azreal1977 at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>  > Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2007 22:40:44 +0300
> > From: danielv at tx.technion.ac.il
> > To: squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org
> > Subject: Re: Fishing for a CS Masters Thesis Topic
> >
> > Under languages:
>
> Also under languages:
>
> What I would personally like to see worked on is having a better language to
> fill the systems programming roll.  Right now everything converges on C/C++.
>  There are higher level languages that are used to systems programming (e.g.
> Slang), but as far as I know they *all* convert to C.  The GCC project has
> the ability to take an AST directly to convert to machine code, but this is
> also constrained by what C is capable of.
>
> What I would like to see is some other language used for this "portable
> assembler", but without the assumptions and limitations of C [1].  Instead
> of deciding that added complexity is the solution (e.g. C++) I would like to
> see a language that looked to simplicity.  Personally, I was thinking of a
> Lisp language for this roll because Lisp is the only language I am aware of
> (a useful one anyway) that is actually *simpler* then Smalltalk.  I think
> powerful Lisp macros would also make it possible to build abstractions on
> top of the very low level primitives so that you don't have to do thinks
> like do a function call setup unless you didn't like any of the available
> options.
>
> [1] Some of the limitations I was thinking of are things like the
> stack-based method of doing function calls and the inability to catch
> overflow, but I'm sure there are even more.
>
> Thanks,
> Jason
>
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