Fishing for a CS Masters Thesis Topic

Bergel, Alexandre bergel at iam.unibe.ch
Fri Jun 22 10:27:40 UTC 2007


Hi!

> 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.

Would you mind to elaborate on this?
Do you mean having a kind of perform: in a statically typed language ?

Alexandre


>
>
> 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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>>
>>
>

-- 
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Alexandre Bergel  http://www.bergel.eu
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