Suggestion to Open Source the Metrowerks Pascal Compiler P..

Hi,

With Metrowerks withdrawing from the Macintosh development arena, they
have kindly considered Open-Sourcing the PowerPlant framework, making
life a little easier for their (soon-to-be former) customers.

While this discussion is open, I figure that this would be the only
time that the following idea could happen, so I would like to make the
following suggestion: Metrowerks, would you Open Source the Pascal
compiler plug-in? I am talking about only their front-end language
compiler; the back-end PPC compiler they will want to keep internal
(which is okay, since creating a back-end x86 compiler for it is what
the Open Source community will want).

Here are some thoughts on this I hope Metrowerks may find persuasive:

1. As with the Open-Sourcing of PowerPlant, Metrowerks offering this
would be a very nice gesture and generate some positive public
relations (which they could certainly use right about now).

2. Pascal has a very small marketshare, and a market which CodeWarrior
does not compete in anymore, so there will be no negative impact on
sales.

3. Where Pascal is still used today is primarily by hobbyists and the
educational community. Users of Metrowerks' Open-Source Pascal
compiler who graduate onto embedded systems development will already be
familiar with Metrowerks and thereby be more inclined to recommend
using CodeWarrior.

4. An opportunity becomes available from the Mac community to build an
x86 back-end compiler for the Mac, allowing Mac/Pascal users to be
up-to-date on creating modern applications.

5. As the Pascal front-end language compiler is processor-agnostic,
developers on a wide range of systems could use this fron-end compiler
for back-ends of and number of environments.

Since MWRon no longer acts as the speaker for the Mac community
(although perhaps he is still reading this?), I thought I'd pass this
along to the newsgroup at large, to see if anyone else feels that this
would be of value. If so, I would like to know what appropriate
individuals left at metrowerks that this suggestion should go to.

Thanks again,

Jonathan Hoyle

Hi Ron,

Thanks for the response. That is dissappointing, but understandable.
How about the old, original Pascal (and Modula-2) compiler from the
pre-CodeWarrior days? It's my understanding that they used an entirely
different codebase that the CodeWarrior version. Granted it's much
older and would require more work to modernize, but it would at least
have no impact on your modern products, and could be useful to those
wishing to bring it up to speed.

Thanks,

Jonathan