Joe Ganley: T

Paul Graham just posted a history of the T language written by Olin Shivers, and it got me reminiscing. T was a Lisp/Scheme dialect. I took a compilers class my first year in grad school (ulp - 17 years ago!), and the semester project was to write a compiler for a subset of Pascal (all that was missing, IIRC, was user-defined types) into object code for a hypothetical microprocessor (for which we were provided a virtual machine). At the time, I was ramping up on a master's research track around optimizing the compilation of purely-functional languages like Haskell for doing numerical computations. My C chops were very strong, I figured I wasn't going to learn much more about C programming from this project, and my research would need me to know T, so I got the bright idea of writing the compilers project in T. I brought this idea to my compilers professor; he thought this was a very bad idea, and tried to talk me out of it, but ultimately capitulated with the understanding that I would be free-climbing - if I fell down, he wasn't going to be sympathetic. (This is a man who once said that the only legitimate excuse for turning in an assignment late is your own death.) I'd never really programmed in Lisp before, so learning the language (as any Lisp programmer knows, a major change in mindset) while under the gun on a long, difficult assignment was quite a challenge. However, ultimately I got it done; as far as testing could determine, it worked perfectly, and it had about 30% as many lines of code as my classmates' C implementations. I had fun, I learned a lot about both Lisp programming and writing compilers, and it brought me some small renown in the department (I presented on the project to a number of compilers and programming languages classes). Later, when I told this story in job interviews, my interviewers seemed to appreciate the accomplishment, but especially the attitude involved in bucking the system in this way. Not long thereafter, my would-be advisor left the department, and I ended up doing algorithms research instead; this would end up being a career, and I love it, but I still feel a little wistful about languages/compilers research. Still today, T is my favorite language I've ever written in, though Python is closing fast. BTW, in the unlikely event that anyone is interested, here is the source code for the compiler.

Labels: compilers, programming

Joe Ganley	I make software and sometimes other things.

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T
Paul Graham just posted a history of the T language written by Olin Shivers, and it got me reminiscing. T was a Lisp/Scheme dialect. I took a compilers class my first year in grad school (ulp - 17 years ago!), and the semester project was to write a compiler for a subset of Pascal (all that was missing, IIRC, was user-defined types) into object code for a hypothetical microprocessor (for which we were provided a virtual machine). At the time, I was ramping up on a master's research track around optimizing the compilation of purely-functional languages like Haskell for doing numerical computations. My C chops were very strong, I figured I wasn't going to learn much more about C programming from this project, and my research would need me to know T, so I got the bright idea of writing the compilers project in T. I brought this idea to my compilers professor; he thought this was a very bad idea, and tried to talk me out of it, but ultimately capitulated with the understanding that I would be free-climbing - if I fell down, he wasn't going to be sympathetic. (This is a man who once said that the only legitimate excuse for turning in an assignment late is your own death.) I'd never really programmed in Lisp before, so learning the language (as any Lisp programmer knows, a major change in mindset) while under the gun on a long, difficult assignment was quite a challenge. However, ultimately I got it done; as far as testing could determine, it worked perfectly, and it had about 30% as many lines of code as my classmates' C implementations. I had fun, I learned a lot about both Lisp programming and writing compilers, and it brought me some small renown in the department (I presented on the project to a number of compilers and programming languages classes). Later, when I told this story in job interviews, my interviewers seemed to appreciate the accomplishment, but especially the attitude involved in bucking the system in this way. Not long thereafter, my would-be advisor left the department, and I ended up doing algorithms research instead; this would end up being a career, and I love it, but I still feel a little wistful about languages/compilers research. Still today, T is my favorite language I've ever written in, though Python is closing fast. BTW, in the unlikely event that anyone is interested, here is the source code for the compiler. Labels: compilers, programming 0 Comments: Post a Comment << Home