On 16 Aug 2012, at 19:29, Stéphane Ducasse wrote: > > On Aug 16, 2012, at 6:13 PM, Ralph Boland wrote: > >> I read a paper once (at the University of New Brunswick (Canada)) >> library in which the grammar for a language was used to construct a >> data compressor for syntaxly correct programs. The output was a >> compressed form of a parse/syntax tree with comments and white space >> included. Once decompressed, the tree could be used to reconstruct >> the source. I don't know if a compressed syntax tree would be very useful >> for >> programming tasks but it could be used to compress Smalltalk's source >> file and changes file. This assumes the time saved by filing in >> smaller chucks of programs segments would greater than the cost of >> decompression. > > do you have the reference? > One guy told me and in Oberon or something like that the ast was compressed > long time ago.
Franz, M. & Kistler, T. (1997), 'Slim Binaries', Commun. ACM 40 (12) , 87--94 . http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=265576 -- Stefan Marr Software Languages Lab Vrije Universiteit Brussel Pleinlaan 2 / B-1050 Brussels / Belgium http://soft.vub.ac.be/~smarr Phone: +32 2 629 2974 Fax: +32 2 629 3525
