[Lazarus] Request for student project ideas

[Marco van de Voort]

On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 03:35:25PM +0200, Hans-Peter Diettrich wrote:
> >>> So you are suggesting a preprocessor that reads C and outputs Pascal? :-)
> >> No, this were what ToPas does. Instead I suggest to skip the 
> >> intermediate Pascal code, and to compile the given source code immediately.
> > 
> > It would mean integrating a full blown substitution based preprocessor.
> 
> As the one implemented in ToPas...

Yes. And while I don't like that, if there is a real need, that can be
escaped. I just don't see a real need.
 
> > But this is a sidetrack of the real problem: I don't see a real benefit in
> > integrating a C compiler.
> 
> Then you don't want to use any of the many C libraries, out there? Like 
> lex, yacc, regexp, zip, SVN...

We can already statically link to C code, so what exactly is the point?
True, header converting is pain, but a blessing compared with the amount of
work to maintain a fullblown C compiler.

Moreover it would be a feeble shade of a compiler to compile a handful of
libs only, and you get tons of maintenance work in return. All the C parsing
and implementation oddities, GCC compatibility issues, tools preparation
( autoconf etc), libraries etc.

It would probably always be 5 steps behind GCC anyway.