Subj : Re: Preprocessor Languages To : comp.programming From : akarl Date : Wed Jul 20 2005 09:52 pm Mike wrote: > On 2005-04-03, Matt Gregory 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. ....and Eiffel and Oberon... .