Re: GNU Modula-2 status

[Joe Buck <jbuck at racerx dot synopsys dot com>]

> I'm very interested in getting the GNU Modula-2 sources into the main
> egcs source tree - if or when the egcs committee think this is
> appropriate.

Since April 1999 the egcs committee is the GCC committee.  While some
occurrences of the string "egcs" still occur, they are being eliminated
except where they are are really tricky to kill.  So please say
"GCC" not "egcs".

GCC now means "GNU Compiler Collection".  The collection might some day
include Modula-2.

My personal feeling is that now is not the best timing, because the
maintainers are busy with completing required work for the cutover to
gcc-3.0 and have many issues to deal with, but even so you can make some
progress on the work needed to make it eventually happen.

> I don't believe I've modified egcs code at all (apart
> from rtl.c) which, on the version I'm using (egcs-20000103), I've
> modified the fancy_abort function to point the finger of suspicion
> towards GM2 not GCC :-)

20000103 is almost eight months ago, and there have been many changes
since then.  One obvious requirement is to get your code working with the
current GCC CVS sources.  The biggest change since Jan 3 is probably the
elimination of obstacks and use of garbage collection instead (if I recall
correctly, the change happened after then), but there are others as well
-- others are much more expert on what's changed than I am.

> I've signed the FSF assignment forms last year, including the
> wonderful assignment future, posted them to rms and have received a
> snail mail photocopy of the same forms as confirmation.

Terrific.  It's probably too late to get Modula-2 integrated in time
to be part of gcc-3.0, but it would be terrific if users could just
download an "m2" overlay onto their GCC tree and have it work.