interpreting Core Erlang

[Richard Carlsson]

On Thu, 1 Apr 2004, Luke Gorrie wrote:

> P.S., is there any technical reason not to rewrite the Erlang
> interpreters in the debugger and/or shell to interpret Core Erlang
> instead?

In the debugger, the main reasons are that 1) it's easier to map a
program point to the original sources if you are more or less already
interpreting the original sources* - the Core code is harder to follow,
and 2) if you'd make the effort to rewrite the debugger, it would be
better to have it work directly on Beam code, with mappings from program
points to source code lines, etc.

In the shell, you'd still have to go through pretty much the same
motions anyway in order to first translate the code to Core Erlang and
then interpret that. So it doesn't really make anything simpler.

	/Richard

*) For those of you who did not know this, the debugging info actually
includes the syntax tree for the whole module (after preprocessing,
expansion of record-syntax, and some other small things).


Richard Carlsson (richardc@REDACTED)   (This space intentionally left blank.)
E-mail: Richard.Carlsson@REDACTED	WWW: http://user.it.uu.se/~richardc/
 "Having users is like optimization: the wise course is to delay it."
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