https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=119232
James K. Lowden <jklowden at gcc dot gnu.org> changed:
What |Removed |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ever confirmed|0 |1
CC| |jklowden at gcc dot gnu.org
Last reconfirmed| |2025-05-21
Status|UNCONFIRMED |SUSPENDED
--- Comment #3 from James K. Lowden <jklowden at gcc dot gnu.org> ---
Isn't GENERIC itself the AST? "The purpose of GENERIC is simply to provide a
language-independent way of representing an entire function in trees." What
more abstraction is needed?
Perhaps my point of view explains my opinion that GENERIC should have a
canonical, compilable textual representation. IMO a mature, well-designed
language to represent compilable trees already exists: Lisp. If GENERIC could
be dumped as Lisp, it could be examined in detail, and the output of different
front-ends (or different versions of the same front-end) could be compared.
For us, GENERIC dumps were a requirement to get the COBOL FE up and running.
No existing dump options were useful. We wrote our own GENERIC dumper (twice!)
only to see it rejected.
An ambition of mine, when we add OO to GCC COBOL, is to make COBOL objects
binary compatible with C++ objects (within semantic constraints). A
fine-grained understanding of C++ GENERIC will doubtless be part of that
endeavor.
I'm not sure what to do with this PR. I don't understand what the goal of
-fdump-lang-all would be for COBOL, or what it would show, or how it would
improve on what we have already found useful.
