[fpc-devel] Pascal to Javascript - Call for Help

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

Michael Van Canneyt wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> After many years of dreaming of an open source version of Morfik 
> Appsbuilder,
> (and more recently Smart Mobile Studio), I've finally committed a first 
> version of the pascal-to-javascript conversion engine.

:-)

>   As a consequence, not all pascal constructs will be supported (pointers,
>   direct memory access jump to mind).

I've spent time over the last few months converting some Javascript to 
Pascal. The thing that really stood out in the original code was that 
bitwise manipulation of integers (specifically, integers of the order of 
48 bits) was poor, resulting in gross overuse of multiply and mod operators.

As a side effect of this (unless, of course, everything works first 
time), I'm hoping to put time into some comparison utilities that- if 
things work out- will be smart enough to locate corresponding statements 
in two different languages. If my recollection of the algorithms is 
correct, central to doing this is that the relative size of lines stays 
more or less the same, i.e. the longest lines in the Javascript 
translate to the longest lines in Pascal (and, obviously, vice versa).

-- 
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk

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