[Cuis] OMeta

[Casey Ransberger]

Buddy I'm telling you this OMeta thing is hot as coals. I don't understand its internals terribly well, which is why I haven't tried porting it. But it's fantastic. 

Have a look at the writings page at the VPRI website to get a feel for what it's about. Short version: inspired by Meta-2, but that just deals with streams of characters, whereas OMeta deals with streams of _any object_. Thus: many complex functions of compiler design are reduced to the exact same thing; transforming input into output in a grammatically concise way. 

It won't likely perform as well as the compiler we're using now, but I'll bet a dollar that it can express our current compiler infrastructure in an order of magnitude less code, if we use it artfully. 

For folks experimenting with language designs on high-end workstations, the performance of the compiler rapidly becomes irrelevant, and the simpler description drops way less cognitive load on your head.

It would be very cool to have a Cuis compiler written in OMeta to compare and contrast with the one we have inherited from Smalltalk. The performance of the two would be interesting to compare, as would be the number of source lines of code, as well as that foggy "legibility" thing. 

If there's a single thing that I'd like to see supported in Cuis, the parasitic metalanguage is it.

It's like an upgrade that makes every language your toy. 

--C