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From: rbowman <bowman@montana.com>
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Subject: Re: Naughty =?UTF-8?B?Q+KZrw==?=
Date: 7 Jan 2026 21:29:45 GMT
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On Wed, 07 Jan 2026 15:27:28 GMT, Scott Lurndal wrote:

> Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> writes:
>>On 2026-01-06, Waldek Hebisch <antispam@fricas.org> wrote:
>>
>>> In alt.folklore.computers c186282 <c186282@nnada.net> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 1/6/26 07:16, Waldek Hebisch wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> In alt.folklore.computers c186282 <c186282@nnada.net> wrote: <snip>
>>>>>>    Hmm ... look at all the GNU 'compilers' -
>>>>>>    FORTRAN, COBOL, Ada, 'D', M2, Rust,C++, G++, even Algol-68. None
>>>>>>    are 'compilers' per-se, but to-'C' TRANSLATORS. So, 'C', pretty
>>>>>>    much All Are One And One Is All.
>>>>> 
>>>>> No.  Compiler as first stage translate given language to a common
>>>>> representation.  This representatiton is different than C.  Ada and
>>>>> GNU Pascal have parametrized types, there is nothing like that in C.
>>>>>  C++ (and some other languages) have exceptions, C do not have them.
>>>>>  There are several smaller things, for example Ada or Pascal modulo
>>>>> is different that C/Fortran modulo.  During optimization passes gcc
>>>>> keeps such information, to allow better optimization and error
>>>>> reporting.
>>>>> 
>>>>> There were/are compilers that work by translating to C.  But this
>>>>> has limitations: generated code typically is worse because language
>>>>> specific information is lost in translation.  Error reporting is
>>>>> worse because translator is not doing as many analyzes as gcc do. 
>>>>> For those reasons compilers in gcc generate common representation
>>>>> which contains sum of features of all supported languages and not C.
>>>> 
>>>>   You give it a file in whatever lang, it produces a file in 'C' and
>>>>   compiles that.
>>>
>>> No, if you looked at what compilers in gcc are doing you will see that
>>> there are no intemediate C file.  There is intermediate assembler, but
>>> between source file and assembler each compiler work independently
>>
>>Still, Bjarne Stroustrup's first implementation of C++ was a program
>>called cfront, which translated C++ to C.
> 
> Rather ugly C, at that.   I had to fix a bug in PCC[*] caused by the
> excessive use of the comma operator in the cfront generated C code.

Speaking of ugly...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F2c

It does produce C code that does compile but 'human readable' isn't part 
of the deal.