>>>>> "Stavros" == Stavros Macrakis <macrakis at alum.mit.edu> writes:
Stavros> Raymond:
>> >> I have thought about always translating Maxima's input into Lisp and
>> >> then running the Lisp code, instead of interpreting the internal s-expr
>> >> representation.
Stavros> You could of course do this, but if you want to preserve current
Stavros> Maxima semantics, in the absence of additional information
Stavros> (declarations), you'd end up with simple things like f(x) being
Stavros> translated to...
Stavros> ...do you really want to debug
Stavros> running code that looks like that?
>>
>> No, of course not. But you rarely need to debug the assembly output
>> from a C compiler either. Unless you're the compiler writer, in which
>> case you might. :-)
Stavros> But in your proposal, if I understood it correctly, there would be no
Stavros> interpreter, only a compiler. So if you get an error in the middle of
Stavros> your code, it would have to be reported in terms of that running code,
Stavros> not in terms of the constructs that the user/programmer entered. In
Stavros> modern compiled language environments, source-level debugging is
Stavros> handled by a system which keeps track of the correspondence between
Stavros> source code and compiled code (and often doesn't support source-level
Stavros> debugging at higher levels of optimization). Yet another layer to
Stavros> add....
Yep. Obviously it can be done, but it's now growing to be a very,
very large task, for somewhat unclear benefits....
Ray