[Lazarus] Parser

[Hans-Peter Diettrich]

Michael Van Canneyt schrieb:

>> ... because it increases the maintainance work on fpc. Even with one
>> front end only we are almost unable to keep the issue count under
>> control. I'am pretty sure that more front ends will be rejected without
>> more people working on bug fixing in fpc.
> 
> Exactly. We can barely cope as it is. If we compiled C as well, we'd get 
> bug reports about glibc or whatever C library fails to compile.

I've already translated a couple of available C libraries into Pascal, 
using ToPas. There exist only a few constructs that do not translate 
into Pascal directly (bitfields...), but their addition to the compiler 
(code generators) should not be a problem - in the easiest case they can 
be emulated in pure OPL, not affecting the code generators at all. At 
statement and procedure level most languages don't differ much, and FPC 
even has the C operators already implemented. Since the ToPas C parser 
is written in OPL, its adaptation should be easy. This may become my 
next project, after the parser...

> And, frankly, the project is called "Free Pascal" for a simple reason: 
> it is a *Pascal* compiler and a *Pascal* project.

Microsoft started with a couple of compilers, until they implemented a 
common back-end for all "Visual" languages, and later they invented the 
CLR. gcc also allows to add FEs for a certain class of languages, so why 
should FPC not become another Free Portable Compiler?

I wonder how somebody can say "it's hard to do", without having even 
tried ;-)

DoDi