Dear Frank,
Maybe you misunderstand how parser generators are used.
I guarantee you that's the case for me. I read through Bison and I liked it very much, and I am thoroughly convinced of its merit by your ^C example. But my first look through the Bison manual page suggested that the output was a C program that we would then compile and link to, which means that at least part of our Pascal compiler would be written in C.
Given the extent of my inexperience, but at the same time my eagerness to help, perhaps you could explain to me how we could use Bison on the way to a self-compiling Pascal, or how the C-code output of Bison (if that's indeed what it puts out) could be part of the project in a way that left us independent of the GCC back-end problems.
I'm not saying that I think the Pascal to C++ compiler is a bad idea, it's just that I don't see how I can be effective in helping you with that solution, so I'm keen to understand the other possibilities.
Yours, Kevan