Re: language design implications for variant records in a pascal-like language

Thanks all for your replies. They've been helpful.


Tentatively, I'm calling my language Wipl (for Wirth Inspired Programming
Language).


Supposing Wipl, Oberon, and Ada to lie in the same "nanny language" category,
Wipl sits much closer to Oberon than to Ada, though I think Oberon somewhat of
a minimalist extreme.


As for the use of Wipl, I would like to keep it in the "general purpose"
category, mainly for applications, but also poentially for OS development. I
was hoping one day to translate minix or (a subset of) linux to Wipl. This
goal is what got me thinking about variant records.


I suppose I have an initial prejudice against variant records. They seem to me
to be a potential source of hard to find bugs (for the user programmer, I mean,
not the compiler designer). Am I wrong about this? Is it possible for the
compiler to always know which type is active in the variant, like say through
a hidden compiler-generated variable in the record?

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