[fpc-devel] Alternative parsers

[Martin Schreiber]

Am 19.10.2010 09:37, schrieb Michael Van Canneyt:
>
[...]

> Currently all we got from Hans Peter were unmanageable patches
> supposedly fixing things that were not broken or in need of fixing.
>
> If he had first done some smaller things - take your pick in the bugtracker
> - and we had seen that this goes well, then maybe such pervasive changes
> would be discussable.
>
> You also would't let the handyman from around the corner construct a
> 10-story
> appartment building just like that, I suppose, and then go and happily
> live in the penthouse ?
>
> In each case, this is the "chronicle of a death foretold". Not because we
> don't want changes, but because all guiding road signs we put up have
> been ignored since day 1. Just read the mail threads. It starts with the
> discussion that the fcl-passrc parser doesn't handle all compiler
> constructs. Instead
> of fixing that, Hans-Peter went off on a completely different angle, for
> which
> none of the core developers saw any future, and on more than one occasion
> pointed this out. And here we are now...
>
Agreed 100%. FPC is used in *production*!
We can't accept experimental changes of the compiler architecture in 
trunk. Also refactoring because of personal preferences, aesthetics or 
new design patterns or paradigms must be handled very carefully so the 
quality of the compiler really increases over time. There is a big 
danger of degrading the stability by such changes which are not planned 
by the core developers.
Many thanks to the FPC core team that they try to steadily improve the 
quality of the Free Pascal compiler and do not allow scientific 
experiments with the codebase.

Martin