A language-agnostic language

[Dimitri Maziuk]

Timo Stamm sez:

I doubt that it has any practical value.

Which part: destructors and overloaded operators, or decompiling them
into Java?

Dima

 

[Dimitri Maziuk]

Chris Uppal sez:

Someone once described the .NET MSIL as the world's first skinnable language.

Someone must have a very short memory span: ISTR several msdos compiler
products back in the nineties that compiled different languages into the
same intermediate language first. TopSpeed was one. I suspect Borland
does that with Delphi/C++ Builder, too.

There is, of course, any number of products that generate code (in various
languages) from UML class diagrams or SQL DDL statements from ERDs.
In other news, water was recently found to be wet.

Dima

 

[Mike Schilling]

Chris Uppal sez:

Someone must have a very short memory span: ISTR several msdos compiler
products back in the nineties that compiled different languages into the
same intermediate language first. TopSpeed was one. I suspect Borland
does that with Delphi/C++ Builder, too.

There was a time at which many of the popular VMS language compilers shared
a back-end, so there's a sense in which they shared a common intermediate
representation (though it wasn't a language per se.) But .NET is also
designed such that the MSIL-based languages are interoperable and share a
common class library. That's not true of your other examples, so far as I
know. (Actually, it was largely true of VMS, but with VAX assembler in the
place of an IL.)

 

[Timo Stamm]

Timo Stamm sez:

Which part: destructors and overloaded operators, or decompiling them
into Java?

Decompiling SMIL into Java/C++/J#/C#/VB.

 

[Dimitri Maziuk]

Mike Schilling sez:

There was a time at which many of the popular VMS language compilers shared
a back-end, so there's a sense in which they shared a common intermediate
representation (though it wasn't a language per se.) But .NET is also
designed such that the MSIL-based languages are interoperable and share a
common class library. That's not true of your other examples, so far as I
know. (Actually, it was largely true of VMS, but with VAX assembler in the
place of an IL.)

It is true of Borland's products: Deplhi and C++ Builder share a common
class library and are interoperable. Or they were back when I last used
them. Common representation is presumably happening at object code level.
They had to add a bunch of keywords to C++ to make things compatible at
high level, and I strongly doubt things like templates are supported by
Object Pascal front-end, so they aren't 100% interoperable.

Dima