Subject: Re: Thanks, q's, please review web page
From: Vassily Litvinov (vass@cs.washington.edu)
Date: Fri Mar 03 2000 - 19:27:45 PST
Hello, Douglas M. Auclair,
Craig Chambers would be a better person to respond to your emails, but he
is on vacation now, so I'll give a couple of partial answers.
It is interesting to hear about using Cecil/Vortex in an intructional
environment. I don't remember hearing about other such experiences.
Craig Chambers has taught our grad compiler course with a Vortex-based
project in the past, so a couple of tutorials (perhaps outdated) can be
found at:
http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/courses/cse501/96/tutorials/cecil-tutorial.ps
http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/courses/cse501/96/tutorials/vortex-internals.ps
> 1. I'm looking over the vortex.cshrc, which is (of course) very unixy
> flavored. This is fine for unix boxen, but do you have a .cshrc example
> from your Windows NT build? Specifically, do I replace
I don't have access to a Windows vortex.cshrc, but modifying the one you
have should be straightforward (and also depends of specific paths in your
Windows environment).
> setenv VORTEX_SH /bin/sh
>
> with
>
> setenv VORTEX_SH E:\\cygnus\\cygwin-b20\\H-i586-cygwin32\\bin
>
> Does setenv even work with CygWin?
I believe so. All these VORTEX_ variables should correspond to your
configuration. Does this answer your question?
> 3. So, is there a comp.lang.cecil and comp.soft-sys.vortex? If not, then
> when? Mailing lists? And is the Vortex 3.0 from February _1999_? Because
> I didn't see it until March of 2000. When's the next release planned?
You can subscribe to the cecil-interest mailing list (see instructions on
the Vortex release web page), although I don't know if it is intended to
be read-only or not. There is no new release anticipated at this moment.
> I've set up a Cecil web page at http://www.geocities.com/cecil_programmer.
> Please, if you wish, review it and let me know if I've written anything
> wrong there.
The page strikes me as highlighting non-central features of Cecil.
Starting from the title ("Predicate language") and focusing on two design
patterns, your goal really seems to be discussion of those aspects, not
presentation of the language. So if that's the case, the page title
should be different. Also, it feels that the phrases "Cecil uses visitor
pattern and incorporates state pattern" contradict our approach to Cecil:
to provide powerful and orthogonal language features. It just happens
that the features conveniently support these two, as well as probably a
few other, design patterns.
We put together a page with a brief description of Cecil's features at
http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/projects/cecil/www/cecil.html
although admittedly we look at the language from a certain perspective and
we certainly encourage other views of the language like yours.
BTW I have never heard of contravariant and covariant inheritances. Where
do these terms come from?
Thank you again for your interest.
Vassily
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