[M3devel] C-like syntax for Modula-3 [was Re: "target specific pragmas"?]
hendrik at topoi.pooq.com
hendrik at topoi.pooq.com
Sun Feb 17 19:58:41 CET 2008
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
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