[Gambas-devel] Re: Using GAMBAS for running Visual Basic projects

[Richard Stallman]

    > The natural approach, which I think would be easiest, would be to
    > write an alternate parser that reads VB programs and generates GAMBAS
    > byte codes.  How about considering that?

    Of course it is possible. But it implies that there will be two compilers to 
    maintain,

It is not two compilers, just two front-ends.

To support two different languages inevitably requires two parsers.
Any method of supporting these two languages will requires at least
that much.  Most other ways really will require two compilers,
but this way only requires two front ends.  So I think it is the
best way to do the job.

    And the native visual-basic code is not so difficult to translate.

When you say "difficult to translate", do you mean "difficult for a program"
or "difficult for a human"?

If you plan to use a program to do this, that program will include a
parser for VB syntax.  It would be less work to maintain the parser as
part of a compiler front end.

    Logically, yes. But I have no knowledge about the Java byte code
    and the way it works. And I wanted to write my own bytecode
    because I wanted to implement a few ideas of mine, and because it
    was fun.

I think it would be a useful idea to investigate whether you could
redirect the output to Java bytecodes, or some other popular and
already-existing kind of bytecodes.  It would increase
interoperability, and that is very useful for the users.