[Tinycc-devel] tcc in the language machine

[Peri Hankey]

I thought members of this list might be interested to see how the 
excellent tiny C compiler can be combined with a generalised toolkit for 
language. My language machine is under gnu GPL, and it's at

http://languagemachine.sourceforge.net

This is a complete rewrite of software that I developed and used in real 
projects over a long period that began in 1975. The software consists of 
a shared library which implements the 'language machine', a minimal main 
program,  several different flavours of a metalanguage compiler (all of 
which are written in the same metalanguage and share the same frontend), 
and a number of examples, including the application that generates the 
web pages from wiki-style text.

An example which directly generates and executes C code using tcc is at

http://languagemachine.sourceforge.net/tcc_calc.html

The language machine is intended to be useful across a wide range of 
applications, from quick'n'dirty text mungers upwards - anything that 
has a linguistic or grammatical component. It compiles to rules wrapped 
as shebang scripts, to rules wrapped in the C and D languages, and to 
rules compiled as (slightly odd) C and D language procedures, and it's 
quite easy to call external procedures in the C and D languages.

The neat thing about it is that it lets you play directly with the 
fundamentals of language. The engine can generate a diagram that 
explains exactly how rules are applied, and it turns out that an engine 
that directly and efficiently implements the most general kind of 
recognition grammar is very much like a macro processor that lets you 
define your own syntax as part of the macro definition.  It does this in 
a way that lets you concentrate on recognising and transforming patterns 
that happen to contain symbols of the kind that appear only in the rules 
of the grammar. Going at it this way, you can do everything from lexical 
analysis to code generation.

Incidentally, the D language that I have used to implement the engine at 
the heat of the language machine is an interesting advance from C. A 
tiny D compiler would be really useful - I may yet try to combine libtcc 
with the D language frontend (see web pages) that I wrote as an 
exercise, but that would probably turn out a bit heavier than something 
hand coded along the lines of tcc.

--
http://languagemachine.sourceforge.net - The language machine