Hello, folks!
Only one small question/suggestion: Does there exist a f2p or c2p translator program which translates Fortran resp. C source to Pascal source? If not, I suggest that somebody writes it because of the following reasons:
- Practical reason: It would be nice to import libraries written in C, C++ or Fortran automatically. For most purposes, it would be sufficient to have a program which ports C header files to Pascal Unit (Module) interfaces.
- Psychological reason: The existence of a c2p would demonstrate that Pascal is at least as powerful as C. The existence of a p2c (which does in fact *not* support everything which is possible in Borland Pascal -- I am thinking of the Object extensions) is ac- cepted by many people as a "proof" that C would be superior to Pascal, so we should "proove" the opposite direction. :-)
I am almost sure that at least the c2p program does not exist because Standard Pascal has indeed less abilities than C. However, you can do everything which is possible in C with GNU Pascal (including e.g. pointer arithmetics -- just do a type cast to Integer), so the main difficulty will be to *understand* the C source, not to translate it. C++ could be more complicated as long as GNU Pascal does not (yet) have multiple inheritance. For Fortran, I don't see any problems, since there are complex numbers in GNU (Extended) Pascal, but one should translate goto statements to structured statements wherever possible..
One idea how to write it: Just use the front-ends of the GNU compi- lers and replace the assembler back-end by a Pascal back-end. Once you have understood how the front-end passes information to the back-end, the job will be straightforward. (One could even easily generalize it to a general x2y translator ...! :-)
I have not the time to do it myself :-( so I ask *you* if you are willing to do this important contribution.
Yours,
Peter
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dipl. Phys. Peter Gerwinski Fachbereich Physik Universitaet-GH Essen Phone: +49-201-183-2763 D-45117 Essen Fax: +49-201-183-2120 Germany e-mail: pege@mail.theo-phys.uni-essen.de --------------------------------------------------------------------------------