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Re: Target-specific Front-Ends? (Was: front end changes for
- From: Joe Buck <jbuck at synopsys dot COM>
- To: mark at codesourcery dot com (Mark Mitchell)
- Cc: zlaski at apple dot com (Ziemowit Laski),jsm28 at cam dot ac dot uk (Joseph S. Myers), gcc at gcc dot gnu dot org (gcc at gcc dot gnu dot org)
- Date: Tue, 27 Nov 2001 14:53:26 -0800 (PST)
- Subject: Re: Target-specific Front-Ends? (Was: front end changes for
Mark writes:
> Concretely, the Altivec specification allows "vector" to be either a
> macro, or a context-sensitive keyword. The latter is a much better
> choice, and it is the one we should adopt in GCC. It will be far
> less intrusive.
Allowing "vector" to be a macro would be completely unacceptable, because
people will mix C and C++ code.
> Other things are more difficult. Vector literals should just be
> C99 compound literals, but I'm not sure whether we can get away
> with changing that or not.
A modest proposal:
Consider a preprocessor that takes current Altivec C code and produces
either standard or extended C code (GNU extensions). If adopting the
existing Altivec syntax is too painful, a second choice might be to figure
out syntax choices that would make such a preprocessor very easy to write.
Then we don't have to ask existing users to rewrite their code.