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Re: Using of parse tree externally
- To: dewar at gnat dot com
- Subject: Re: Using of parse tree externally
- From: Mark Mitchell <mark at codesourcery dot com>
- Date: Fri, 20 Oct 2000 08:55:24 -0700
- Cc: espie at quatramaran dot ens dot fr, gcc at gcc dot gnu dot org
- Organization: CodeSourcery, LLC
- References: <20001020123858.551B034D92@nile.gnat.com>
>>>>> "Robert" == Robert Dewar <dewar@gnat.com> writes:
Robert> <<I said that people are going to take other, proprietary
Robert> front-ends, teach them about GCC extensions/quirks/bugs,
Robert> and hook them up to proprietary back-ends/tools.
Robert> The impact of this is that proprietary tools vendors will
Robert> have access to tools that present easy-to-use
Robert> representations of a program written in GNU C.
>>>
Robert> OK, well that's something quite different, and is
Robert> perfectly legitimate competition. A little competition is
Robert> not necessarily a bad thing :-)
No, it's not.
But the point is that the FSF may eventually want to reconsider its
policy on not having GCC dump out easy-to-manipulate information in
light of this development.
Otherwise, proprietary developers will access to important information
(the AST for the a GNU C program) that free developers do not.
If, for example, that AST is going to be represented as XML, I think
it would be good if the free software community set a standard for the
format, rather than letting a proprietary product do it first.
--
Mark Mitchell mark@codesourcery.com
CodeSourcery, LLC http://www.codesourcery.com