Pascal front-end integration

[Mark Mitchell]

E. Weddington wrote:

>> Personally, I'm not necessarily convinced that adding Pascal to GCC is 
>> a good idea.  I like Pascal just fine, but because every new language 
>> adds to the load on everyone.  (In my ideal world, we'd have stable 
>> enough interfaces that it was easy to maintain front ends separately 
>> from the rest of the compiler, but, though I've been extolling that 
>> vision for years, I've made little progress in realizing it...)
>>
> So, the changes for 4.0/4.1 still don't help the situation enough? Or is 
> it too early to tell?
> 
> Or would you just want to make sure that the Pascal maintainers play "by 
> the rules, as everybody else", a la Ada?

I've no cause to worry about that; I don't know the Pascal maintainers 
at all.  It's just that every new language imposes costs, such as:

* Changes to interfaces require more places be updated.

* Major reworks require buy-in/work from more languages.  (For example, 
it took a long time to get rid of the RTL inliner because we needed to 
convert all of the languages.)

* Bugs show up that can only ever affect one language, but then people 
feel they ought to fix them, rather than fixing something else.

* Things get added to the middle end that help only one language, 
sometimes causing breakage

* Downloads, cvs update, etc. get slower.

It's my personal opinion (not that of the SC, or the FSF) that before we 
add a language we ought to convince ourselves of more than just the fact 
that someone's willing to maintain it; we ought to convince ourselves 
that the benefit to users will be sufficiently great that it's worth 
imposing these costs.

-- 
Mark Mitchell
CodeSourcery, LLC
mark@codesourcery.com
(916) 791-8304