Re: Patch checked in for K&R stage1 cc on obtabs.c

[craig at jcb-sc dot com]

>In a message dated 5/25/99 8:56:49 AM Pacific Daylight Time, 
>ghazi@caip.rutgers.edu writes:
>
>> 	Why would we want g77 in K&R style?  I feel its reasonable to
>>  not only assume ANSI C but also GNU C for the language front ends
>>  other than C.  It would certainly make writing and supporting them
>>  easier.
>It doesn't seem like there's much chance of writing g77 so that it will build 
>directly on sub-ANSI/ISO compilers, nor would extra effort be justified.

The last part might be right, but I don't know of any reason why I can't
fairly easily ensure that g77 will build on K&R C compilers as part of
the rewrite.

As I said, the back end already provides most, if not all, of the important
facilities.

I believe it's the case that, right now, to "fix" g77's K&R bugs, all
that is needed is to PROTO-ize a whole bunch of definitions and
declarations (presumably a Perl or Guile script could do that right quick)
*and* -- the harder, and less-worthwhile part -- move all the
statement-expressions in target.h into target.c as proper functions.

(target.h and target.c happen to be the primary "targets" -- naming
something of a coincidence -- of the rewrite.  If the rewrite accomplished
nothing else, rewriting those, and the related code in the front end,
would solve most/all of the cross-compiling problems, make it much easier
to support intrinsics in PARAMETER statements, and probably make `-r8'
and `-i8' easy to support as well.)

        tq vm, (burley)