[M3devel] C-like syntax for Modula-3 [was Re: "target specific pragmas"?]

[hendrik at topoi.pooq.com]

On Sun, Feb 17, 2008 at 01:11:39PM -0500, Tony Hosking wrote:
> Not to rain on this parade, but I hate the idea of Swiss-Army-knife  
> programs that do a multitude of tasks.  Better to have a program do  
> one thing well (and correctly) than many things badly (incorrectly).   
> So the notion of one compiler handling two syntaxes does not sit well  
> with me.  Why not just a preprocessor from C-like syntax, which  
> observes Modula-3 typing and semantics, into regular Modula-3?  But,  
> I echo Olaf's point -- there are way more important things to be  
> worrying about than the color of the ceiling tiles, or in this case  
> syntactic sugar.

Even with a preprocessor from C-style syntax to Modula 3, there would 
have to be some mechanism inserted into the Modula 3 compiler to 
recognise the original line numbers for error messages and debuggers and 
the like.

Doing it this way might also make it possible to unify the Eiffel and 
Modula 3 communities ... though tere are possible better ways to
accomplish this.  I've always thought there's a lot of duplication of 
effort in their run-time systems.

-- hendrik