Hi Frank,
On Tue, 2010-07-27 at 00:16 +0200, Frank Heckenbach wrote:
Hi everybody,
since GPC development has mostly stalled, I've thought about if and how its development could be continued. Here are my current thoughts about it. Since the text is quite long, I put it on the web: http://fjf.gnu.de/gpc-future.html
[...]
I'm one of those who uses GPC for legacy code. Important legacy code, since it's the major code we use in our modelling and data analysis, which I started back in the 80s as a postdoc.
So I am eternally grateful that GPC saved me the trouble of rewriting the code when our main platforms became Linux, after using CDC, Prime, AIX, Sun and DEC machines (and perhaps some others that I've forgotten...)
My code is mostly generic Pascal, but I do interface with the Lapack libraries and some of the C file-handling functions. In fact, I mostly use an ancient Linux version of the compiler, since I have no need for developments of the language itself.
The translation idea sounds like a robust way of maintaining the Pascal capability and it offers the interesting possibility of running code on systems that only have C++ compilers installed by shipping the translated code rather than trying to install a Pascal compiler. If one wants to run on a supercomputer, for example, one may have limited compiler options. Even for generic Intel machines, one might want to recompile code optimised for the particular platform.
Mike
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