[Gm2] Re: Modula-2 with Cocoa and/or GNUstep?

[Gaius Mulley]

> posted on behalf of Bee Kay:
> 
> > Hi
> > 
> > I would like to know if anybody is doing or thinking of doing any 
> > work to integrate Modula-2 with Cocoa and/or GNUstep?
> > 
> > I could imagine something like an M2/ObjC bridge such as the Python 
> > ObjC bridge "PyObjC", although this may be rather difficult due to 
> > the fact that M2 is statically typed. Has anybody been looking at this at 
> > all?
> > Any experiences to share? Any code fragments left over, even if abandoned?
> > 
> > I was thinking myself about whether or not it would make sense to 
> > craft a new "dialect" derived from Modula-2 in the exact same way 
> > that Objective-C was derived from C. In other words bolt on a Smalltalk
> > based message  passing syntax and leave the language otherwise as it is.
> > Initially this could be realised in form of a preprocessor that would 
> > translate
> > "Objective Modula-2" into Objective-C. Later on, it could evolve into a GCC 
> > front-end, possibly drawing from the work done on GNU Modula-2.

Hi,

as you say, probably the most rapid form of development would be to
write a preprocessor which allows you to relatively easily experiment
with your new language. You can also embed line number and file number
information into the Objective-C to ensure that the debugger
references the original Objective Modula-2 source - to ease debugging.
You might wish to use/examine the m2.lex and gm2/bnf/m2.bnf components
which will give you the m2 parser and lexical analysis phases.

> > Anybody interested to explore this further?

Not until the ISO dialect of Modula-2 is complete :-)

regards,
Gaius