Re: hello

[Marko Mikulicic]

On 12.11.2005., at 21:46, Abelardo Gutierrez wrote:


> Hi, I have been maintaining Sather for a couple of month and:
>
> 1) yes, the last release is the 1.2.2, I have not released a new
> version of the development branch since I take over the maintenance.
> Basically 1.2.2 was a fix to make the stable branch work with gcc 3.x,
> but it has been tested only on Linux, since I don't have access to any
> other platform.  But it should compile fine in other platforms with
> ANSI standard c compilers, may be you're not following the build
> procedure (building 1.2.2 is not the standard autotools process).

I ran succesfully sather 1.2.2 with gcc 3.4.2 on a x86 linux.
I had to correct the System/Common/CONFIG file
for some strange reason quotes for the PLATFORMS value was misplaced:

-- This file has been created by......
...


"   <- note here
------------> GNU Sather ....
......
-- for a detailed desc........ PLATFORMS: "linux;    <-  note here
DEFAULT_PLATFORM: "linux";


on the macosx platform I've made a couple of changes. For example  
there is no
values.h and not f_log single precision functions.


> 2) the last maintainers left the repositories at Savannah in very bad
> shape, and since I have only received a few questions since I've been
> sather's maintainer, I haven't taken the time to clean it up and sync
> with my development tree.  But if you are interested I could make it,
> so we can work together in this.

Yes I would be very interested in the GNU sather project.
Do you think is feasible to make it a frontend of GCC?


> 3) I have an almost ready version of the 1.3 branch that I will
> release soon. it will be nice if we can make it work both in linux and
> osx.

yes. Maybe switching to use the autotools would be a good point to  
gain from the experience
of many developers of portable software. Personally I hated autotools  
because they seemed to
create monstruos makefiles and take really long time to execute, but  
then I learned how they work
and saw that the major problem is automake and most of the times the  
inherent complexity of the software.
 It's possible to use only autoconf without automake.

I find interesting the sather language. There is only one think that  
I find annoying:
why is not possible to inherit from a concrete class?
For example I would like to subtype INT and constrain it to a  
specific range (like in ada).
without having to create a specific numeric subclass with all of its  
methods etc, but just by defining a class invariant.

regards,
Marko Mikulicic