On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 6:45 PM, Jonathan Scott Duff <perlpi...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 8:31 PM, Jon Lang <datawea...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >> Forgive my ignorance, but what is a Prelude? >> >> -- >> Jonathan "Dataweaver" Lang > > The stuff you load (and execute) to bootstrap the language into utility on > each invocation. Usually it's written in terms of the language you're > trying to bootstrap as much as possible with just a few primitives to get > things started.
OK, then. If I'm understanding this correctly, the problem being raised has to do with deciding which language features to treat as primitives and which ones to bootstrap from those primitives. The difficulty is that different compilers provide different sets of primitives; and you're looking for a way to avoid having to write a whole new Prelude for each compiler. Correct? Note my use of the term "language features" in the above. Presumably, you're going to have to decide on some primitive functions as well as some primitive datatypes, etc. For instance: before you can use meta-operators in the Prelude, you're going to have to define them in terms of some choice of primitive functions - and that choice is likely to be compiler-specific. So how is that any easier to address than the matter of defining datatypes? Or is it? -- Jonathan "Dataweaver" Lang
