Kevan Hashemi <hashemi@brandeis.edu> wrote:

> I would recommend a book by Per Brinch Hansen titled "Brinch Hansen on
> Pascal Compilers". It handles RD parsing of Pascal and includes source
> code and commentary for a Pascal-subset compiler.

P5 is a much better basis for a compiler front end, being 40 years old,
very well documented, and completely ISO 7185 compliant (not a subset),
and completely free of copyright or license encumberments.

> GNU Pascal on the other hand might confuse potential contributors away
> as they probably think its a GCC front end. You'd always have to
> explain "Yes, we're GNU but we don't do GCC, we do LLVM". That sort of
> thing is usually unhelpful.

If LLVM creates a GCC that takes a real, file based intermediate
language,
then that sounds like a win. Marrying the GCC front end to the backend
as a single program was a classically bad design decision that I have
always suspected was made for the goals that others here have described.

Scott Moore