Re: Portability Considerations

[Alice Osako]

As it happens, there are at this time a number of places in my code 
which are entirely dependent on the GNU GCC implementation (not so much 
in the UNICODE support right now as in the GNU Readline bindings which I 
also created for the same project that got me started in this), never 
mind any specific standard, and I don't see any way the resolve that in 
a reasonable manner.

While I said earlier that portability was desirable, this was before I 
knew much about the state of the language today. As such, I no longer 
consider portability as being worth the effort at this time, since quite 
frankly, supporting other compilers is well outside the scope of this 
project.

The fact is that I didn't set out to implement UNICODE for Modula-2; it 
came as a third-order requirement of what is after all a hobby project 
(an implementation of the MAL project) in which the choice of Modula-2 
as the implementation language was as much from the fact that GCC now 
supported the language in the compiler trunk as it was the absence of an 
existing implementation in that language. The lack of proper editor 
support for Modula-2 led me to attempt to write a Language Server for 
it; this led to the need for a JSON parser; and the JSON parser in turn 
required UNICODE support.

It was never my intention to dive so deeply into this. The only reason I 
have continued with this at all is because I am hoping to learn from the 
process, both about Modula-2 and about the various technologies I am 
trying to implement.

As for PIM, now that I have a better idea of its history and 
limitations, I am entirely willing to write Wirth's book - in all 
editions - off as a legacy standard. It is no more relevant to new code 
in Modula-2 than K&R C or Ada-83 would be for new code in those 
languages. I can understand that it is very important for compiler 
support, or to someone maintaining existing PIM code, but for something 
written today it seems like a peculiar thing to be concerned about. Am I 
wrong in thinking this way?