Proto for Boost mailing list page: Re: [proto] talking proto

Subject: Re: [proto] talking proto
From: OvermindDL1 (overminddl1_at_[hidden])
Date: 2010-07-16 18:09:04

On Fri, Jul 16, 2010 at 7:19 AM, Eric Niebler <eric_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> On 7/16/2010 2:12 AM, Joel Falcou wrote:
>>
>> I think proto is currently filling a hole which will increase in
>> importance. Putting my researcher cap back for a minute, I can tell you
>> that the DS(E)L topic is relatively hot at the moment with effort from
>> a lot of big guns like the SCALA team from Standford or Paul Kelly's
>> team from Imperial College. They all use various host languages and
>> various technology to implement these and I think C++ with the help of
>> Proto has a major role to play in this paradigm shift. So having some
>> brain tank here about that feels important to help push these kind of
>> work in both academic and industrial contexts.
>
>
> I am not familiar with other technologies used to implement DSEL in
> other languages. Are you? Can you point me to some information or
> describe the other efforts in this area? I used little more than my own
> needs and my knowledge of compiler construction toolkits to guide the
> design of proto. Maybe there are other good ideas out there we can steal.

Lisp is the ultimate example of a language that supports DSEL, you
could even create C++ in Lisp, or Python, or any DSEL specific to any
function.  The way you use Lisp is not even to program in it, but
rather to make a DSEL for anything that you are doing.  Here is a good
example:
http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/lisp.html

Now if only C++ had this power over its own syntax tree...