Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!rutgers!bellcore!faline!sword!yba
From: yba@sword.bellcore.com (Mark Levine)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Software Distribution
Message-ID: <848@sword.bellcore.com>
Date: 6 Sep 88 20:07:56 GMT
References: <22778@amdcad.AMD.COM> <965@esunix.UUCP> <5642@june.cs.washington.edu>
Reply-To: yba@sabre.bellcore.com (Mark Levine)
Organization: Bellcore, Red Bank NJ
Lines: 34

In article <5642@june.cs.washington.edu> pardo@cs.washingtone.edu (David Keppel) writes:
>Yes, what we need is a high-level machine language that we can
>translate our programs into and then is sufficiently general that we
>can compile *that* efficiently into native machine code.
>

In days gone by I was quite fond of MARY, a language in use (still, I
think) at the University of Trondheim and on various North Sea oil
drilling platforms.  It was one of several topics of ye olde Machine
Oriented Languages Bulletin from IFIPS, and even showed up at IFIPS
w.g. 2.4 while I watched.  Since those days, I have seen few attempts
at high level machine oriented languages.

The folks at Tartan seemed to have the best shots at an intermediate
representation for these purposes, based on Wulf et. al.'s work at
CMU.

MARY would require you to have an implementation prelude for each machine
on which you compiled to give machine specific definitions of basic
constructs (allowing for assembler level optimization, since the language
gurantees access to all machine ops).  You could also supply preludes
which defined the semantics of operations from other architectures and
what to do with them on a new machine.  The language is fully typed,
and has precedence-less left to right evaluation, and has the notion of
a current value -- this makes it easy to program, if somewhat unnatural
for those trained to think an assignment statement has the variable on
the left.

There is an awful lot of good stuff on the shelf, but I think it stays
there as long as proprietary interests remain larger than portability
concerns.  Given the recent movement toward UNIX OS standards, window
system standards, and ignoring ADA, perhaps it is time for some archaeology;
but, how serious is anyone's interest in a really portable machine oriented
high level language?