[Oopic-compiler-devel] Summary

[Neil D. <nd...@us...>]

I went through our longish thread of ideas and question asking and have
come up with a summary of what we discussed, just so we know where we are:

* What level of C language support are we aiming for?
  We all pretty much agreed to implement C as completely as we can within
  the constraints of the OOPic, so aiming for K&R/ANSI where possible but
  foregoing things like floating point support.

* What other languages do we want to support?
  It seems we're all in favour of C as the primary language to support, but
  BASIC seems to be the more popular amongst the community.  So
  implementing both looks like the best bet, with Java syntax as a
  runner-up.

* Do we want a mode that allows "standard" OOPic BASIC/C/JAVA to be compiled?
  I think we all agreed that some kind of preprocessor to do the conversion
  would be the easiest, converting 'legacy' OOPic script syntax to our new
  improved syntax.
 
* What platforms do we want to support?
  General concensus was DOS, Windows, Linux, and maybe Mac.  We should aim
  to use libraries available on all these platforms to try and maintain a
  single codebase for all the platforms.

* What implementation language(s) do we want to use?
  We all agreed on C.

* Should we use a compiler compiler, such as flex/bison/lex/yacc ?
  Looks like we're all in favour of this, as it will save development time
  and make adding/changing the supported syntax easier.

* What extra features do we want to support?
  We came up with:
   Inline functions
   Word / byte / bit arrays in EEPROM via direct references rather than function calls:
   Proper shift operators
   Malloc to work in EEPROM, and providing pointer arithmetic, similar to Andy's lib
   Libraries of useful scripts and VC stuff
  Also need to think about these features:
   Differentiate between VC and interpreted code, like Delphi divisions
   More object-oriented style for user classes (perhaps)

* What bugs in the existing languages do we specifically want to address?
	We tackle every bug we know of

* Do we need structures and unions, for example?
	Would be nice in the long term

* Requested feature list
    We agreed to publish an intended feature list to the forum once we're confident we can
    do stuff, and see what else people want.

* Are we making a collection of command line tools, or are we considering an IDE?
    The general concensus was for command line tools

Neil
-- 
Neil Durant
<nd...@us...>