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Bril: An Intermediate Language for Teaching Compilers

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170 points signa11 | 1 comments | 27 Jul 24 03:50 UTC | HN request time: 0.204s | source
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fire_lake ◴[27 Jul 24 09:24 UTC] No.41085430[source]▶
I thought that ANF is considered a dead-end?

Now the main choices seem to be CPS (which is seeing a bit of a resurgence!) and SSA.

So why teach ANF?

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1. Vosporos ◴[27 Jul 24 10:08 UTC] No.41085543[source]▶
ANF is very much not considered a dead-end. It is the opposite number of SSA from the Functional programming languages perspective. CPS overlaps with it but also has properties, like requiring whole-program transformation, that do not help with predicting the final shape of the program.

See https://pauldownen.com/publications/anf-continued.pdf, https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/comments/13w3c... and https://langdev.stackexchange.com/a/2254 (as well as https://www.college-de-france.fr/sites/default/files/media/d... as a bonus)