> You know, I've always wondered why there wasn't a lisp-family front end > for GCC, the roots of GNU and RMS being where they are (and didn't RMS > promise way back when to make lisp suitable for unix systems > programming?). I'm just not connected enough to the lisp world to know > the answer I guess. I also don't know. We chose scheme because it was the only language we knew of whose specification was small enough to read and still have some time left to code in a semester :-)
> That's pretty much *exactly* what I had in mind--minimal front end that > produces a useless, do-nothing, but "correct" front end. Even the > motivation is the same, since as you might expect this was a preface to > a language project. :-) Nice. If you notice, the documentation consists of a series of steps. In the first one a front end that does nothing is created. In the second step an empty main is generated. Unfortunately, even a hello world front end is a bit hard to explain :-( > I'd be happy to cooperate as much as possible. The goal was to write > the document I needed myself and didn't find, and in so doing learn the > knowledge I'd have gotten from it. It wasn't to write for writing's > sake. If you've done everything I wanted, so much the better. :-) > > That said, I haven't actually looked at your docs in detail. It took me > a while to install svn, figure out how to do a checkout and what URL to > use, find the system docbook stylesheets, and put their path in the > makefile (not too bad for someone who has never seen docbook or used XML > before, I thought), and learn enough about docbook to find an > alternative to fop (I am not eager to install it because I'm trying to > keep this machine not-too-dependent on a jvm. :-) ) I use the html output mostly. Fop generates a very bad pdf IMHO, but I was able to run it (without support for images) with kaffe. > A quick look suggests that what you wrote is very like what I wanted to > end up with. The main difference is that I suspect I was going for a > bit more exhaustive detail--whether that's a good or bad thing is a > separate issue. Having a more details is a good thing I think, but remember that the details are likely to be the first thing that will become out of date. > Were you thinking hosting the html version somewhere eventually? We have written it in docbook to be able to eventually send it to TLDP. Currently the two co-authors have requested the copyright paper to submit the front end itself to the gcc trunk. After that we might try to update the tutorial a little bit and send it to the TLDP. > Thanks, that's the sort of comments I was hoping for. > > Dustin My pleasure, once we discovered how complicated the front end interface was, we were sure that someone else could benefit from the our experience :-) Rafael
