Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!intercon!news From: amanda@mermaid.intercon.com (Amanda Walker) Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript Subject: Re: Compiled PostScript Message-ID: <1666@intercon.com> Date: 2 Jan 90 17:05:20 GMT References: <17518@rpp386.cactus.org> Sender: news@intercon.com Reply-To: amanda@mermaid.intercon.com (Amanda Walker) Lines: 25 In article <17518@rpp386.cactus.org>, woody@rpp386.cactus.org (Woodrow Baker) writes: > The only such program I could think of would be a > > postscript compiler written in postscript... > Right. An impossiblity. Oh, come on. Sure you could write a PostScript compiler in PostScript. As you are so fond of saying, PostScript is a real computer language... Don Hopkins has written a pretty nifty PostScript debugger in PostScript, the heart of which is a PostScript interpreter written in PostScript. Glenn Reid's PostScript "distillery" is a more pertinent example. The problem is what to generate as output. Glenn's stuff generates PostScript. Someone with your willingness to depend on implementation details could generate strings containing 68000 machine code to link into the interpreter with "cexec" on a Redstone controller... I doubt it would be of any practical use, since, at least on printers with old controllers (like the LW or LW+), I'd wager that most of the time is spent doing actual imaging, not in parsing the input or walking through an executable array. Amanda Walker InterCon Systems Corporation --