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From: gwyn@smoke.brl.mil (Doug Gwyn)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Compiling ANSI C on non-ANSI C environment
Message-ID: <14806@smoke.brl.mil>
Date: 10 Jan 91 16:10:54 GMT
References: <2865@hsi86.hsi.com> <14824@goofy.megatest.UUCP>
Organization: U.S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory, APG, MD.
Lines: 15

In article <14824@goofy.megatest.UUCP> djones@megatest.UUCP (Dave Jones) writes:
>I'm wondering why there is seems to be no ANSI-C to C compiler around,
>a la "cfront", the C++ to C compiler. It would seem to be a natural.
>There are a couple of things that would have to be kluged up a little --
>passing floats rather than doubles as parameters, for example -- but
>that's no big deal.

First of all, the ANSI-C to C translator is called "cat" on UNIX systems.
Of course, what you really meant was a translator from standard C to some
flavor of pre-ANSI C; unfortunately there are numerous incompatible
dialects of the latter.  Even if you narrow that down to be "4.3BSD PCC's
dialect of C", the translation is by no means trivial -- a conforming
implementation would be about as difficult to obtain that way as writing
a genuine compiler.  It is not clear that a non-conforming attempt would
be worth all that much.