🚀 go-pugleaf

On 11 Mar 91 00:35:47 GMT, aipdc@castle.ed.ac.uk (Paul Crowley) said:

aipdc> In article <1991Mar10.145908.10575@hawk.cs.ukans.edu>
aipdc> billk@hawk.cs.ukans.edu (Bill Kinnersley) writes:

billk> Definition of an interpreter: 
billk>    A case statement inside a do loop.

Quoting myself from long ago: *all* programs are hierarchies of
interpreters. All programs are composed of modules each of which is an
interpreter. An interpreter is composed fo some code (the glue) that
navigates some data structure and examines each of its elements, and of
some code (the library) that provides the ways to handle each element of
that data structure. Either glue or library may be trivial or implicit,
of course.

Important note: the above definition implies that *control* abstraction
is vital to implementing glue, while *data* abstraction is vital to
implementing library functions. OO programming only provides the latter.
Research on control abstraction is very rare.

aipdc> Corollary:  Most X programs are interpreters.

Well, so much so than most other things. Yes, definitely the X server is
an interpreter, or rather, a hierarchy of interpreters. I'd say that X
clients programs are interpreters, even xclock (it interprets just one
instruction).
--
Piercarlo Grandi                   | ARPA: pcg%uk.ac.aber@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk
Dept of CS, UCW Aberystwyth        | UUCP: ...!mcsun!ukc!aber-cs!pcg
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