[Lazarus] Request for student project ideas

[Hans-Peter Diettrich]

Jürgen Hestermann schrieb:

>> Oberon is not just an arbitrary other language, it is Pascals younger
>> brother and ALGOL is their mother and it is told that the same guy named
>> Wirth was around at ETH Zürich both times when they were created.
> 
> But there seems to be a reason that these guys didn't enhance Pascal but 
> created completely new languages.

The primary reason for new languages is to replace the old syntax by a 
better one. This was done in Modula, the ancestor of Oberon. Then 
objects were added, with various improvements. Finally garbage 
collection was added to Oberon. Only the garbage collection is really 
new to FPC Pascal, and it IMO is the only thing that may deserve 
modifications to the compiler. And GC is a nice playground for student 
compiler projects :-)

>> I'm not sure how flexible the compiler is and how easy or difficult
>> implementing a new frontend would be, not all the languages in your list
>> are statically typed so much of them wouldn't make sense at all for this
>> compiler, but maybe ALGOL, Modula and Euler would be cool also, to make
>> this family of languages more complete.
> 
> I don't think that it is wise to use a Pascal compiler to compile code 
> from another language, even if it is very similar to Pascal in some 
> respects (and if it's even possible). I believe that there are 
> fundamental differences, otherwise it would not be a different language.

Right, there exist languages that are compatible with FPC, and others 
that are incompatible.

> And the existing {$MODE..} modifications are already too much. They were 
> added to avoid code modifications to older programs but they never help 
> me to avoid them yet. In the end, the code had to be adapted anyway.

Most languages do not deserve new modes, because the source files have 
other than PAS extensions.

> I would prefer not to do even more of these modifications so that noone 
> can read any code snipped anymore because he does not know which 
> language is meant.

ACK.

DoDi