front-end target arithmetic (was: [G95] Re: [tree-ssa] Integrating g95)

[Michael S. Zick]

On Tuesday 03 June 2003 01:45 pm, Laurent GUERBY wrote:
> On Tue, 2003-06-03 at 17:34, Michael S.Zick wrote:
> > On Tuesday 03 June 2003 07:40 am, Geert Bosch wrote:
> > > Now of course, this is mostly because Ada requires calculations of
> > > "static" expressions (subset of compile-time known expressions) to be
> > > performed exactly.
> >
> > Ouch.
>
> Well for a language designed in 1995, I don't believe it's that silly
> to require this given the portability advantage it gives
> for not that much work on implementors.
>
Agreed, it is a great feature; one more step towards having the same
program behaviour regardless of the ultimate platform it is executed on.
>
> Well, you're trading clean and simple code for configure/header/Makefile
> headaches :).
>
> If GCC decides to implement such a thing in C as a front-end service,
> with care to special services required by the Ada front-end (I can think
> of being able to dump/reload the number table from a file
> like Table.Table does for GNAT), I'm inclined to think that Ada
> maintainers wouldn't mind dropping the current Ada code
> and just Import the C routines, probably low priority though.
>
Thought I saw a place to tie several different discussion threads 
together, so I just had to ask.
If there is nothing here to win, just put the subject of a common math
library for all of the front-ends on the "probably never happen" list.

Mike
>
> Laurent