Re: standard intermediate representation for C/C++ ?

John says:


      Can you really do a DIANA-like thing for C? I'd think that the syntactic
      messiness introduced by the preprocessor would make it awfully hard to
      come up with anything that was simultaneously easier to handle than the
      original source and didn't lose something significant in
      translation.


C macros are lexical macros rather than syntax macros, so in general a
Diana-like representation isn't feasible. However, if you're willing to
restrict yourself to syntactically well-formed macro bodies (you forbid ##
and, e.g., "#define BEGIN {"), you should be able to manage. This is done
by the ANDF producer (front end), in order to support installer (back end)
macro expansion, which is necessary for platform-dependent macro
expansion.


I can't see how to get around expanding syntactically ill-formed
macros, though.


-s
[I was more worried about things like typedef inside #if which can have
pervasive and rather messy effects, e.g. a particular name may be a scalar
or an array depending on preprocessor values. And can you tell us more about
experience with ANDF? -John]
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