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Re: anonymous CVS stuff
On Mon, 26 Jul 1999 21:16:17 -0700, David Starner
<dstarner98@aasaa.ofe.org> wrote:
>What's the obvious one?
>The best is that the users of Modula-3 & Ada would generally agree that C
>is an awful language to write a compiler in.
In a way you've given the answer yourself :-) The obvious is that
those that write a frontend do that because they prefer that language
for the features it offers.
>frontend (for Jovial), and I'm seriously considering writing in Ada,
>because I don't want to write a project that large in C.
Yes, and the one major obstacle with that approach is how you
bootstrap your frontend. A frontend written in something else than C
necessitates that you need either a precompiled binary or assembler
source for the host architecture.
While C has its drawbacks, it's guaranteed that you do have the stage
1 gcc present and thus no problem to compile your frontend (at least
in respect to the compiler :). Look at the frontends currently present
in GCC - all of them written in C and for a reason!
If it wasn't for this bootstrapping problem, I'd have no objection.
Philipp
--
Close the windows! The penguin is freezing.