Ask HN: Why is there no universal representation for all programming language?

2 pointsLouisEleven3y ago2 comments

Why does it even matter what programming language is being used when everything is compiled to machine code in the end? Wouldn't it be possible to convert any programming language into the same intermediate representation?

When googling this myself, many answers are something like: each language has its own characteristics which makes it more or less suited for solving certain problems. But why does that matter, if they all end up being machine code? What am I missing, or what are the difficulties with creating such a universal representation?

2 comments

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dtagames3y ago

Even the machine code isn't universal but rather tied to the hardware it's running on.

The short answer is that any "intermediate" form is just another abstraction over machine language. It's turtles all the way down, as the old joke goes. The world of software is one of varying layers of abstractions, each with a specific, constrained purpose and benefits. There isn't one abstraction to rule them all.

Having said that, there are several universal ways to represent the syntax of any individual language. My favorite is EBNF[0].

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Backus%E2%80%93Naur...

richardjam733y ago

All Turing complete programming languages are mathematically the same, they only differ in the way they do IO. You can't write a algorithm in C that cannot be written in Haskell or visa versa. If you had a universal representation language it would be no different than having C.

As you say the difference is really how hard it is to solve certain problems plus the way they expose IO.

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