A FrontEnd in C++?

[Zack Weinberg]

On Wed, Aug 21, 2002 at 07:59:45PM +0200, Michael Matz wrote:
> >
> > It seems that many people are more sanguine about allowing front ends
> > to be written in their own languages than I am.
> 
> Although note, that the initial posting wasn't about adding a new frontend
> written in it's own language, but simply written in C++, for which we
> already have a frontend.  This has not the usual bootstrap problems.
> While this doesn't provide the same testing for the new language, the
> maintenace burden of this approach is far less.  Yes we (or better the
> developer of that frontend) would need to ensure that he's interfacing
> correctly with the backend, but that can be done with a rather small C
> part, like e.g. Ada does it.

No.  The intrinsic complexity burden I am talking about is exclusively
a function of the number of different languages used in the source
tree (ignoring runtime libraries).  It doesn't matter which bits are
written in which languages.

zw