Language Design and Language Implementation

Copyright (c) 2000, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers


Throughout this text we have had occasion to remark on the many connections between language design and language implementation. This appendix lists many such connections, with pointers to sections of the text in which they are discussed.

Language features that most designers now believe were mistakes, at least in part because of implementation difficulties:

Potentially useful features omitted from some languages because of concern that they might be too difficult or slow to implement:

Language limitations adopted at least in part out of concern for implementation complexity or cost:

Language features introduced at least in part to facilitate efficient or elegant implementations:

Tradeoffs in which implementation plays a significant role:

Cases in which ease/difficulty of implementation significantly affected the success of a language:

Cases in which a machine architecture makes reasonable features unreasonably expensive:

Miscellany:


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