In our previous episode, Juha Manninen (gmail) said: > Still, C would be doable, for porting SOME existing code to co-operarate > directly with pascal code. If the C code uses lots of library calls it can't > be used directly. But, there is code for math and compression etc. which > don't > call libraries much.
The implementation is much easier I guess yes. But the interoperability remains the same. You still won't be able to access C headers directly from Pascal. Moreover I think the goals of such project can be much easier accomplished by having a C compiler that outputs (FPC) pascal source. > Languages like ADA, Modula (and Fortran ? and Basic ? ) would be > realistic. Modula2 is a special case since very related to Pascal. It needs some work in the module handling (but that work can be recycled for other pascal dialects that were inspired by that, like ISO Pascal too), but the main problem is the lexer/parser, because M2 is case sensitive and has a different block structure (which goes beyond merely being a pascal dialect). The only other problem I can think of is that is primarily has unsigned arithmetic, which might require enhancements/debugging on the semantic parts. I think the same goes for Ada as for C++. The language is so huge, that it is probably better to fork, throw away the pascal part, and then later when the ada support is ok, backport the pascal part back into the Ada compiler. (that will probably be somewhere near 2022) I don't know fortran enough to comment, and Basic is so balkanized dialect mess that nothing can be said about that without specification of what dialect you mean. I can only image VB here, but VB is very complex internally, and the existing codebases are horribly windows specific). Moreover when it finally would be production ready, VB6 would probably be near extinction. _______________________________________________ fpc-devel maillist - fpc-devel@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-devel
