Re: A "Via Pascal" Modula 2 Compiler ?

Marco van de Voort wrote:

> Each his own. I actually ended up with Pascal because while I considered
> M2 to be better on most points, the differences were pretty shallow, and
> Pascal was more practical from a compiler availability view.

This is also my opinion -> hence my project ...


> > GM2 already is an alternative if you do not need all
> > the libraries and interfaces FPC and its community provide.
>
> (the pure interfaces could be machinetranslated to GM2 I think, if GM2
can
> already create headers for arbitrary C libraries. With this I mean, have
> constructs/pragma's for e.g. unions, packing of records etc.
>
> A Coco diehard could probably hack up such converter beast in an
afternoon)

GM2   WILL be an alternative, and mostly for unix & unixlike people,
for others ... well I use OS2/Ecom station a lot, and if I'd wanted an
EMX solution I shoud be compiling with GPM.  This is not realy the way
to go to be GNU free (once again I share your opinion Marco).
FPC is runing NOW, realy alive and available on most platforms and
manages all the ancilaries for you. It offers  a lot of features - OO,
exceptions handling ... The  problem, while translating is (with all
translations included humans languages one)
- 1- don't change semantic
- 2- is it culturaly acceptable in the target  language?
I just know that  most of M2 can be rewriten without much fuss, and
sorry for purists, for me it's not ONLY an intellectual debate.

On interfaces I think you are perfectly right - maybe more than an
afternoon of coco work, but not so much.

If you put FPC at work to output the code (obviously translating
before, specialy base types - easy to do, even in a user configurable
way ), you avoid   all the problems of  interface at linkage time.
Maintenance is tied to the evolution of pascal ... probably beareable
- but yes it's not so clean.
Now I repeat -  I choose  a "something now" versus an "all to morrow".
I don't say either that  I 'll not change in the future - but first I
want  a possibility to write in M2 and have my pgm at work.  It's just
that using M2 and pascal , I feel not so confortable when I switch,
just like when you have a good practice of one language and somebody
comes in with a not so different one - for a while you have
difficulties with the grammar
Just let me say, and I hope nobody will take it in bad part,  if it'd
been so easy to hack a compiler to do a M2 one  I wonder why nobody did
it  before.
For me, if one day I use parts of FPC compiler (possible but not to
morrow morning!) I think I'll try  to go directly to production of
syntax trees acceptable by the back end .

JP2R