4.10 Differents to the 1980s case tools and generators

In the 1980s there where a couple of generators or case tools in use. Those tools have some good ideas but also some bad. Some of the good ideas are used by siliconBrain. Some of the bad are tried to be avoided:

• languages are not newly invented or created. siliconBrain is completely based on existing languages, mainly C (and lisp, bash, awk, ...).
• compilers are not written. siliconBrain is completely based on existing compilers and interpreters.
• binary format of sources is forbidden. All sources are stored as ascii text. Thus sources are able to be handled by CVS, grep and emacs.
• specification screens are not used. Instead all sources of a siliconBrain project can be created and changed by emacs, vi or whatever editor the programmers like.
• portability is not goal. There are no complex layers encapsulating system specific properties.
• strange tools are not used. Everything is based on very common tools like gcc, emacs, GNU make, GNU awk, ... So it should be easy to incorporate with other tolls, lib and software.
• runtime environments are avoided. All components of a siliconBrain project are available as fast command lines (additionally to be available as screens or windows). So there is no virtual machine or runtime environment, which has to be started either explicitly or implicitly before a program can run. So it is cheap to call a siliconBrain based program within a shell.