From: Neil Conway <nconway@...>
Date: 2001-02-20T13:24:25+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:11150] Re: RFC: RubyVM (long)

On Tue, Feb 20, 2001 at 01:26:58AM +0900, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
> For as long as I've been thinking about writing a compiler, I've
> considered metacircularity as an essential feature.

Excuse my ignorance (as a pre-CS person), but why is metacircularity
an "essential feature" of a compiler? What do you gain?

I've always thought that it leads to problems with bootstrapping
the build process, and Ken Thompson's interesting cc-hack. What am
I missing?

Cheers,

Neil

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