Re: Fortran parser

[Steve Kargl <sgk at troutmask dot apl dot washington dot edu>]

On Fri, Nov 28, 2008 at 03:22:43PM +0100, Philippe Marguinaud wrote:
> 
> I have been working for a few years on how to parse Fortran for code 
> maintenance purposes. I have hacked the g95 parser and I have now some 
> good results. You can read the whole story at 
> http://g95-xml.sourceforge.net/.
> Now, I would like my work to be part of some project, such as g95 or 
> gfortran. For some reason, the g95 guru does not want me to do that.
> Therefore, I ask you whether it could be possible for me to join 
> gfortran. I understand that for some of you a Fortran parser just for 
> code manipulation might not be very important, or even not relevant for 
> being part of a compiler. I know that it is not so difficult to do ( 
> only very small parts of the code have to be modified ), and that it can 
> be very useful. I also know that gfortran has a -fdump-parse-tree option 
> which gives some hints about the internals of the compiler, but what I 
> suggest here is really different.
> 
> What do you think ?
> 

I think that it is not feasible to add your XML changes without
placing an additional burden on the gfortran developers.  The
parser is not a static, unchanging, piece of code.  For example,
I'm working on adding the F2003 ERRMSG to allocate and deallocate.
Would I need to add additional code to mark-up ERRMSG in XML?
Would this require me to learn XML?  The contributors to gfortran
already have too little time to work on Fortran features and bugs.

You also failed to identify the extent of the changes that you've
made.  A simple 'diff -urB g95 g95-xml | wc -l ' would tell us 
at least a little bit about the maintenance issues.

-- 
Steve