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From: markg@ashtate (Mark Grand)
Newsgroups: comp.object
Subject: Re: OOD applied to interpreters and compilers
Summary: Compilers can need multiple instances of their components
Keywords: OOD interpreters
Message-ID: <754@ashton.UUCP>
Date: 4 Oct 89 21:33:39 GMT
References: <26873@genrad.UUCP> <5472@portia.Stanford.EDU>
Organization: Ashton-Tate, Torrance, CA
Lines: 29



dchapman@portia.Stanford.EDU (David Chapman) writes:
> Sure.  I'm working on a compiler for an internal language that has two
> different code generators.  I defined a "code generator" interface (the
> language, MAINSAIL, isn't quite object-oriented in the sense that
> Smalltalk or C++ are) and wrote two different modules that implemented
> that interface.
>
> The primary reason that you don't think in terms of objects for
> something like a compiler is that you only have _one_ of the "objects"
> at a time - one lexical analyzer feeds one parser feeds one optimizer

Some years ago I was writing a compiler for a language that really did
need to be able to have muliple instances of its lexical analyzer,
parser, and friends.  The reason for this was that when an undefined
reference to a certain class of object was encountered in the source,
the compiler was supposed to suspend what it was doing and go compile
another file that was supposed to define the object.  This compiler
was written in MAINSAIL.  

----------------

Mark Grand
Ashton-Tate                             markg@alexis.a-t.com
Walnut Creek Development Center         ...!ashtate!alexis!markg
2033 N. Main Street, Suite 980
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