[REBOL] Re: What language am I looking for?
From: gjones05:mail:orion at: 17-May-2001 6:15
Joel, that was a very nice analysis and discussion. I learned quite a
bit. Thanks.
Just one question right up front: have you mentioned recently that you
like REBOL?
;-)
From: "Joel Neely"
<big snip>
> I'm very interested to see if anyone can suggest any others.
> Note, again, that I'm talking about implementation strategies,
> not properties of the "source code" notation.
The strategy that I was chewing on yesterday would probably only make a
small, incremental difference at best. Unlike Petr, I am not only not a
language expert, I am not even a programming expert! (Actually, I'm not
an expert in anything that I can think of!) However, I throw this
example out in the spirit of learning. It would seem that there would
be at least a small performance hit with parsing longer "words" (using
the REBOL parlance) as opposed to shorter, and that the performance hit
is additive in loops. I think that I've read that one of the first
tasks that some compilers undertake is to create its own shortened
variable name list (I've read it as being called mangling, which seems
to carry the human-centric, perjorative connotation) in order to improve
the parsing and compilation speed, and later, linking. I was wondering
whether there would be any speed improvement having a just-in-time
word-length shortening mangler,
and then creating a type of hashed
dictionary. The one draw-back that came immediately to mind would be if
a word name then is used in its literal form, then meaning would be
lost. Additionally, the performance gain would only seem to
significantly improve for longer programs with lots of long words and
numerous or long loops (otherwise, it would seem self-evident that the
JIT "mangler" would cost more than on-the-fly parsing).
--Scott Jones
