Meta-Level Compilation project / Introspector/ AST access / Licensing question

[James Michael DuPont]

> I should have been more careful when I wrote
> "Correct."  Should GCC accept
> patches to provide a standard interface that reads
> and writes compiler
> internals in XML format, with documentation, then it
> would be hard to
> argue that all readers and writers of the format
> would need to use GPL
> licensing, because use by external programs would be
> *intentional*.
Even without XML, all of the patches that I know of by
others who are accessing the gcc this way are via the
tree-dumper. It provides all that is needed (Exept
maybe a really small patch to dump function bodies).

Even without documentation, the source code is
documentation enough.

Also if you are using the tree-serializer patch, then
you cannot prevent anyone from accessing the ASTS in a
GDBM file to create non-free tools.

So I am not doing anything new here, and you cannot
say that the gcc does not have these patches, they are
being used to interface to other tools of different
licenses, even if slightly modified.


Mike

=====
James Michael DuPont

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