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

[Miguel de Icaza]

Hello Kunle,

> > 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.
> 
> This is just a code refactoring issue Miguel, isn't it?.
> 
> > Again, the MCS goals, are very similar to Gnumeric: maintainability
> > comes first.  Performance comes later.
> 
> Code refactoring coupled with judicious application of flexible design
> patterns should allow us to have both in this particular scenario.

Well, my judgment on this particular issue says that you will spend more
time working these things out than the benefit you will achieve (you
still have to review every single line of code to make sense with the VB
semantic analysis).

But feel free to prove me wrong with a working implementation of the
idea ;-)

> Your analysis is right of course for current state of affairs. But, if mcs
> supports many languages (and easy addition of others) and it's design is
> clean/extensible enough, some enterprising soul might just step up to the
> challenge.....perhaps a native executable code generator (perhaps by reusing
> gcc's back end only)?

Usually things go this way:

	Language 1 \                             / Target 1
	Language 2 - Intermediate Representation - Target 2
	Language 3 /                             \ Target 3

	<--- A ----> <---------- B ------------> <--- C --->

You are mixing in your paragraph above many things.  If MCS supported
multiple languages, all the work falls in the A B section above. 
Writing a gcc backend falls in the C section above.

Miguel.