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Re: New front end, help needed
- From: Daniel Jacobowitz <drow at mvista dot com>
- To: James Buchanan <jamesbuch at iprimus dot com dot au>
- Cc: gcc at gcc dot gnu dot org
- Date: Tue, 31 Dec 2002 11:22:38 -0500
- Subject: Re: New front end, help needed
- References: <5.1.0.14.0.20030101031203.009f2a00@pop.iprimus.com.au>
On Wed, Jan 01, 2003 at 03:14:47AM +1100, James Buchanan wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I suppose the thing that stumps me is the trees. I have
> looked in tree.def, tree.h, coretypes.h and many other places
> without much success. Sometimes it appears to be a union
> (coretypes.h - but just a nothing typedef saying tree is a
> pointer to union treenode) but sometimes it appears to be a
> struct. I can't see what it is supposed to be. If I could make
> these trees for arithmetic expressions, assignment
> statements, functions, and so on, then I could compile a
> new language by writing a front end. But I don't even know
> where to start.
> Suppose I need a string, use an ARRAY_DECL (as in an array
> of chars or unicode wchar's) or a POINTER_DECL? I suppose
> I don't use POINTER_DECL, since there is no actual object,
> only a placeholder address for something else, so I use an
> ARRAY_DECL or something to internally represent var$ as
> a C string.
>
> Where to from here? I need to grow strings automagically
> within the compiler, and handle IF var$ = foo$ THEN... by
> calling strcmp() or something like that, within the runtime
> library. How do I implement these operators? How do I
> get the assembler that is generated to hook into the
> runtime code needed?
>
> Sorry for all this, but I am not sure who to ask or where
> to look or anything like that.
You should take a good look at "treelang", which is the sample
frontend, and also a good look at the GCC Internals manual (gccint.info
in gcc/doc/ in a built tree).
--
Daniel Jacobowitz
MontaVista Software Debian GNU/Linux Developer