[cctalk] Re: What constitutes a dead computer language

No part, and I don't recall that any ever did. There are a number of internal representations inside GCC, the specific set and nature of which has changed over time. There's a tree representation, and something called "GIMPLE" (don't remember what that means) and later on there is "RTL" which is what the back ends consume. Those intermediate forms I think are meant to be generic representations of the program, through various transformations. The assorted optimization schemes act on these representations. I suspect part of the reason for multiple representations is that some optimizations are more easly done on one of them and others on a different one. There's a lot of detail about GCC in its internals manual, which is impressively comprehensive. I've only studied small parts of it (I've done back end work but nothing in other parts of the compiler). All the front ends produce as output the first of the internal representations; all the back ends consume as input the last of them. Everything in between is (pretty much anyway) both language and target machine independent. paul