[LLVMdev] Idea for the Summer of Code

[Andrew Wagner]

Hi all,
I have an idea for a proposal for the summer of code which I think is pretty
cool, but I wanted to run it past you all to see what you thought of it
first.

Basically, the proposal is to use LLVM as a test bed for a more theoretical
idea I have. I want to develop a grammar-level way of formally specifying
how to translate between two languages. Borrowing from XSLT (a way of
transforming XML documents), and lex/yacc specifications, I want to be able
to formally describe the process of taking a sentence generated by one
grammar, and turning it into a sentence generated by another grammar.

For example, if I have part of a formal description of a for-block in java,
and the formal description of a for-block in C(++), I want a way to formally
describe how to go from one to the other. Of course, while this example is
source-to-source, a process like this would also have great implications for
machine-language generation. Rather than the compiler doing all the work of
translation and optimization, it would simply take in a mediating
description between the source language and the machine language, and use
that to generate the code.

I'd probably need to be a lot more thorough in the actual proposal, but I
hope this gives you a glimpse into what I'm thinking. I'd love to know what
you all think!

Andrew
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