[fpc-devel] Program too long ?

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

Bernd Oppolzer wrote:
> Jonas Maebe schrieb:
>> On 14/01/16 17:45, Mathias wrote:
>>> The code is machine generated.
>>> I wanted to test which compiler is faster, the. Of FPC or C ++
>>> C ++ could compile the code without errors.
>>
>> Whether or not it can be compiled is unrelated to the language of 
>> course, but to the compiler. We indeed only develop FPC for use with 
>> procedures that don't have an extreme size, because that way the 
>> compiler uses less memory and is faster. Since such massive routines 
>> are often indeed only present in case of machine-generated code, and 
>> since in that case you can usually easily adapt your generation to 
>> split up the code in multiple routines, there's not much incentive to 
>> change this (other than being able to say "yes, we can handle this").
>>
>>
>> Jonas
> 
> Some history:
> 
> The original Pascal compiler (Wirth in the 1970s) also had such an error 
> message
> "procedure too long"; this is a well known issue for almost all compiled 
> languages,
> and such limits hit you most of the time much earlier than physical 
> limits or storage
> limits.

I came across some interesting stuff relating to the history of GCC. 
Apparently Stallman started off with a Pascal derivative ("Pastel"), but 
various things that the compiler did at a syntactic level (if I'm 
interpreting it correctly, roughly comparable with generics) meant that 
it had to be able to hold the entire parse tree in RAM before generating 
code... which exceeded the capabilities of most computers available at 
the time. http://www.webcitation.org/6N4WnuuZk

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

[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]