Re: DefObj

[Marcus G. Daniels]

>>>>> "PJ" == Paul E Johnson <address@hidden> writes:

MD>  Perhaps Objective Caml?  (advantage being a strong type system) Or
MD> maybe Haskell or Mercury?  Mercury has GCC and .NET backends.

PJ> What does "backend" mean in this context?

By contrast, the frontend is the software that parses the language
itself, checks for correctness, and does high-level optimizations of
the user's program using techniques appropriate for the language.  The
backend is called upon to actually generate code for execution.  In
the case of the GCC backend Mercury calls GCC functions to create tree
structures that describe control flow, variable allocations, etc.  GCC
then converts the tree structures into native code for some machine,
optimizing along the way in ways appropriate for that machine.
Alternatively the .NET backend of Mercury generates code suitable for
recompilation by the CLR virtual machine of .NET.  Another obvious
`backend' would by the Java virtual machine.  Mercury can also generate C.
Using C or Java byte code as portable target language is a popular approach
among implementors of high-level programming languages.


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