Re: Front end best practice in GCC 4.1.0?

[Dustin Laurence <dustin at dogbert dot laurences dot net>]

On Wed, Mar 29, 2006 at 05:10:25PM -0300, Rafael Espíndola wrote:

> Two friends and I have started to write a toy scheme front end.

You know, I've always wondered why there wasn't a lisp-family front end
for GCC, the roots of GNU and RMS being where they are (and didn't RMS
promise way back when to make lisp suitable for unix systems
programming?).  I'm just not connected enough to the lisp world to know
the answer I guess.

I hope none of that turns out to be flamewar fodder that was long ago
made taboo for this list. =8-O

> ...As a
> sub product, we have create a hello world front end and a small
> tutorial.

That's pretty much *exactly* what I had in mind--minimal front end that
produces a useless, do-nothing, but "correct" front end.  Even the
motivation is the same, since as you might expect this was a preface to
a language project. :-)

> Depending on what you want, maybe you can write some patches instead
> of a full tutorial :-)

I'd be happy to cooperate as much as possible.  The goal was to write
the document I needed myself and didn't find, and in so doing learn the
knowledge I'd have gotten from it.  It wasn't to write for writing's
sake.  If you've done everything I wanted, so much the better. :-)

That said, I haven't actually looked at your docs in detail.  It took me
a while to install svn, figure out how to do a checkout and what URL to
use, find the system docbook stylesheets, and put their path in the
makefile (not too bad for someone who has never seen docbook or used XML
before, I thought), and learn enough about docbook to find an
alternative to fop (I am not eager to install it because I'm trying to
keep this machine not-too-dependent on a jvm. :-) )

A quick look suggests that what you wrote is very like what I wanted to
end up with.  The main difference is that I suspect I was going for a
bit more exhaustive detail--whether that's a good or bad thing is a
separate issue.

Were you thinking hosting the html version somewhere eventually?

> I think that fortran is a better option. Treelang has the parser mixed
> up with the rest of the front end.

Thanks, that's the sort of comments I was hoping for.

Dustin

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