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 [EMAIL PROTECTED] (916) 791-8304
