[Oopic-compiler-devel] Hello from the new guy

[Brian <bri...@po...>]

All--

Neil asked me to introduce myself as the new guy...there's not much to
say, other than my programming background is mostly in algorithms and
signal/image processing, with a smattering of languages (C++ and Perl
are my faves, though).  My interests in this group lie mainly with a
port that will work under *nix and Mac OS X.  I currently run the
OOPic IDE under wine, but I would prefer something a bit more stable!

I've read through most of the archives, and it sounds like you all have
put a lot of thought into this project.  I do have a couple of
observations:

--There's been talk of writing code to support several different
platforms, including DOS, Windows, Linux, and Mac OS.  Is it the
group's goal to write a replacement IDE/compiler, or to make the OOPic
accessible to platforms not currently supported?  I'd be mostly
interested in helping with a port that runs on a platform not
currently supported... 

--I noticed the consensus is to use C for this project.  While I'm
comfortable with that, won't this become something of a maintenance
nightmare to support several different platforms?   Has any
consideration been given to writing some or all of this project in a
truly portable language such as Python?  There are several Python
parser generators available
(http://www.python.org/topics/parsing.html) that would make porting to
different platforms a snap, and would ease the support for several GUI
front-ends (there is Python "glue" for many GUI libraries, including
Mac's native libraries and a number of libraries, such at GTK+).  Work
on a GUI front-end could be done pretty much independently from the
parser/compiler/loader once an interface has been designed; working in
parallel on the front end and back end would really save time and
effort.


Hope no one take offense to these observations...I'm willing to help
with whatever I can.  

  --Brian