[fpc-pascal] Proper preprocessor?

[Marc Santhoff]

On Wed, 2018-06-20 at 15:09 +0200, Michael Van Canneyt wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 20 Jun 2018, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:
> 
> > The other alternative would be break the compiler in such a way that it 
> > was usable from a standard makefile, but since there isn't separate 
> > compilation of definition and implementation parts this would probably 
> > impact on type safety. I believe that this too has been debated in the 
> > past, and has attracted even less enthusiasm than a hook for an extrnal 
> > preprocessor preprocessor.
> 
> Nothing stops people from preprocessing their code if they need really
> advanced preprocessing: The toolchain can handle it already.
> 
> But there is no need to integrate it in the compiler and thus needlessly
> complicating it even more. The consequences of such a step are far-reaching.
> 
> And till now, no-one has presented the really pressing use cases that would 
> warrant such a step.

The only use case for me would be macros having more than one parameter,
needed when translating C-code.

But I speak up for another reason:

Long ago, at the time of fpc 1.9.x or 2.0.x I did some digging in compiler
source code, the lexer and parser part. IIRC there were some hooks for calling
a proprocessor in the code at that time. If they are still there, wouldn't it
be a solution for both sides?

The compiler programmers only have to activate (or complete) a way to call a
preprocessor, solving the problem of mangled error messages.

The preprocessor user could implement whatever is needed on his or her side?

My 2 cent,
Marc

-- 
Marc Santhoff <M.Santhoff at web.de>