[Mono-list] Re: Should I fork the MonoBASIC project out of MCS?

[Miguel de Icaza]

> Disagree. The VB.NET language (which MonoBASIC is designed to compile) is
> *almost* C# with a VB-derived syntax. I suspect that that there is a great
> deal more similarity once you get past the lexer/scanner than there are
> differences. If we were talking about earlier versions of VB, you [probably]
> would be right.

The semantic rules are going to be different, and I am not planning on
having millions of:

	if (this_is_vb)
		...
	else
		...

In the code, that just makes the code ugly and unmaintainable.  And
whenever there is a difference, you will pay a high price for keeping
the compatibility.

Again, the MCS goals, are very similar to Gnumeric: maintainability
comes first.  Performance comes later.

> What sort of differences in semantic analysis have you encountered or
> foreseen that strongly suggest splitting the compilers?. I haven't looked at
> mcs in detail for a while but there is a great deal of value in having a
> framework that allows for multiple compiler front-ends to share an
> increasingly sophisticated back-end. Or back-ends, in due course...

With the CIL there is not much of a backend.  Specially considering that
we will be writing a CIL optimizer that will perform optimizations on a
CIL .EXE image independently of what compiler was used to generate the
code. 

The CIL defines where the front-end has to stop.  And there is no moving
there really.

Miguel.