[Mono-list] C# Compiler can compile hello world!

[Miguel de Icaza]

> Any clues whether there is a point to use similar approach for compiler
> development? I never developed compilers, so I don't really know whether
> there's much point in doing something like this. My intuition says that
> there should be.

I think we should do this at some point.  During the development of
the parser, I used to feed all the compiler source code through the
compiler and that was very useful, as it did catch various problems
when I made changes to the grammar.

We need to assemble such a regression test suite, you will see that I
have been assembling errors that the compiler should detect in
mcs/errors.  Each file is an error that the compiler should catch. 

The first two lines of each one of those errors describe the error
number and a textual definition of it, and the second line the line
number that must be reported for the error.  

Currently our compiler can not catch many of those errors, so running
the test suite will be a bit dissapointing, but it is something that
we should do, the sooner the better.

Miguel.