Using of parse tree externally

[Robert Dewar]

<<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.
>>

I strongly agree with Mark's assessment here. I think it is wrong to be
too worried about the possible ill effects of generating a tree.

In the case of GNAT, we not only generate a tree, but we provide an API
for reading the tree that has the modified GPL. Yes, that means people
can write proprietary tools for use with GNAT, but we would rather have
them write these tools to work with GNAT than have them only work with
other proprietary compilers, and now it is up to us and others to provide
free software versions of these tools that are superior :-)