port of sather 1.2.1 to mingw32

[Kim Kaiser]

To Sather enthusiasts:

I have completed a port of the sather 1.2.1 compiler to the mingw32 (vsn
2.95.2) running on Win98.

For anyone else attempting this:
A difficult problem I ran into was that when I built the Boot C source,
the resulting Boot executable, when used on a Hello World sather program,
generated many bogus C lines of the form "L11 = L10 + ;".   The cause was
that I ran the
mingw32 2.95.2 compiler on the Boot C source using the -O2 optimization
option!!  When I removed -O2 from the mingw32 compiler command, the
resulting Boot executable generated correct C code for the hello world
sather prog!!  (Perhaps this optim. option has been fixed, I have not
upgraded my mingw32 install for a while.)  I went on to be able to compile
the entire Sather source for the sather compiler into the Bin C source and
build the executable!  So my compiler is indeed robust now, being able to
handle such a large program.

Next, I would like to contribute my porting fixes, notes and changes in case
others could use it.  Best of all would be to add to the GNU 1.2.1 site,
possibly updating the sources there, or perhaps providing my versions as a
separate download.  I have never done these things before.

Also, I would have been in much better shape if the Boot C source would have
been genned with #line references in it, i.e., a -debug_source -only_C
version of the Boot C source.  I was hoping that could be added to the 1.2.1
sites too, perhaps in a BootDebug subdir.

I am aware that there is a 1.3 site in New Zealand, but I have spent more
time on the 1.2.1 install than I should have, so I am not able to download
vsn 1.3 and translate the mingw32 porting changes to that version, for now
anyway.  Perhaps someday...

Thanks to Malome Khomo and Norbert Nemec for encouragement and ideas.

Malome, if you're reading this, I sent you an email which was bounced back
to me.  Please reply and I can forward to your current email address.

Any ideas on how (whether) I can get stuff to the 1.2.1 site would be
appreciated.

Thanks,
Kim Kaiser