[fpc-devel] Pascal to Java compiler

[peter green]

>Well, I think that the compiler could be shared between a native code
>and bytecode machine.
I think the frontend (parsing the language into a tree structure) can
certainly be shared, i'm not sure about the further back stages.
Bytecode environments are certainly very different from native code in
the sense that you can't just treat variables as variable sized lumps of
bytes.

> - One should not attempt to implement Java or C# language constructs in
>   Pascal.
>   
I think to produce a viable compiler you have to. Bytecode environments
don't let you access memory directly so you don't have much choice but
to use the class/interface structure provided by the bytecode
environment. Furthermore all the standard libraries for the language
rely on them as an interface so not being interoperable with them would
be a huge pain.

Lukilly other than the garbage collection issue delphi style object
pascal and java/.net actually have pretty similar object models so it
shouldn't be too hard to map them.