Introduction - The HAC Language

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1 Introduction

But in our enthusiasm, we could not resist a radical overhaul of the system, in which all of its major weaknesses have been exposed, analyzed, and replaced with new weaknesses.
Bruce Leverett, “Register Allocation in Optimizing Compilers”

In the beginning, there was CSP.

This document describes the language specification for the HAC Language.

Should be largely implementation-independent. But we discuss some of the issues.

Our implementation is a multi-phase compiler with four phases:

Compile – like precompiling modules
Link
Unroll – hierarchical expansion of top-level instantiations.
Finalize – unique instantiation after connections.

Compile-time is ...

Link-time is ...

Unroll-time is ...

Finalize is ...