Malcolm would have to attest to how complete it is w.r.t. say, gcc's
preprocessor,
cpphs is intended to be as faithful to the CPP standard as possible,
whilst still retaining the extra flexibility we want in a non-C
environment, e.g. retaining the operator symbols //, /*, and */. If
the behaviour of cpphs does not match gcc -E, then it is either a bug
(please report it) or an intentional feature.
Real CPP is rather horribly defined as a lexical analyser for C, so
has a builtin notion of identifier, operator, etc, which is not so
useful for all the other settings in which we just want to use
conditional inclusion or macros. Also, CPP fully intermingles
conditionals, file inclusion, and macro expansion, whereas cpphs makes
a strenuous effort to separate those things into logical phases: first
the conditionals and inclusions, then macro expansion. This
separation makes it possible to run only one or other of the phases,
which can occasionally be useful.
> One concern is that Language.C is BSD-licensed (and it would be
nice to keep it that way), and cpphs is LGPL. However, if cpphs
remained a separate program, producing C + extra stuff as output, and
the Language.C parser understood the extra stuff, this could
accomplish what I'm interested in.
As for licensing, yes, cpphs as a standalone binary, is GPL. The
library version is LGPL. One misconception is that a BSD-licensed
library cannot use an LGPL'd library - of course it can. You just
need to ensure that everyone can update the LGPL'd part if they wish.
And as I always state for all of my tools, if the licence is a problem
for any user, contact me to negotiate terms. I'm perfectly willing to
allow commercial distribution with exemption from some of the GPL
obligations. (And I note in passing that other alternatives like gcc
are also GPL'd.)
Regards,
Malcolm
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