[PRL] Code's Worst Enemy

Riccardo Pucella riccardo at ccs.neu.edu
Thu Jan 3 22:48:27 EST 2008


On Dec 29, 2007, at 12:06 PM, Peter Dillinger wrote:

> On Sat, Dec 22, 2007 at 11:19:11PM -0500, Riccardo Pucella wrote:
>> The fact that Java contributes to code bloat because of lacking  
>> abstraction facilities is of
>> course a big part of the problem with code size in Java, and that  
>> is something that we now how to deal with better with our languages.
>
> you mean like the kind of abstraction provided by macros?  i estimate
> ACL2s would be no more than 10% smaller than its current 25,000  
> lines if
> i had macros.  and potentially much harder to read & understand.

Honestly, I was thinking type abstractions, parameterized modules  
that can work with those type abstractions, and so on. In particular,  
I want to be able to export an object at a type slightly different  
(more abstract, generally) than its implementation type. And that's  
the easy stuff. Wadler's views (pattern matching datatype values via  
constructors that are different than those defined in the  
implementation of the underlying datatype) are also cool and the kind  
of thing you want at the level of library interface.

  Cheers,
  R




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