Subj : Re: Preprocessor Languages
To   : comp.programming
From : Mike
Date : Tue Jul 19 2005 05:41 pm

On 2005-04-03, Matt Gregory <email@invalid.net> wrote:
> I was just sitting here wondering why there aren't any popular languages
> that are compiled to C.  I know there's Perl and the GNU Lisp compiler,
> but last I knew compiling to C was pretty much a one-way operation,
> since the generated code wasn't manageable.  I'm thinking about some
> way you could work with both languages simultaneously.
>
> How well would this work?: a language that had an interactive
> environment so you could do bottom-up development, but compiling turns
> it into sane, well commented C code, so you could continue working on it
> in C if you needed extra performance or flexibility or whatever.  The
> language could have an escape so you could write inline C code, like the
> inline assembly escape in non-standard C.  That way you could keep
> working with the high level language if you only wanted select parts
> hand written in C.  The interactive environment wouldn't necessarily
> need to understand C, I don't think.  It wouldn't be absolutely
> necessary, anyway.  The compiler would amount to a fancy C preprocessor.
>
> What attempts have been made to do this, and what were the results?
>
> Matt Gregory

There are both Lisp and Scheme systems that compile to C. Java also.

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