Sharing code and data in multi-language environments

It seems to me that one of the weakest points in a compiler system would
be syntactic and semantic control in presence of multi-language modules.
For instance, exporting in one language a routine 'foo' with two arguments
passed by value won't prevent anyone using another language from calling
the same 'foo' with only one actual argument passed by reference. And
nobody will issue a warning if 'foo' is simply considered as a global
variable elsewhere.


This is partly due to the fact that the interfaces, if any, still
are produced 'by hand', and as a consequence, there is a great
risk of lack of consistency.


Therefore, possible research fields could be:


  - Linkers cooperating with compilers to enforce that kind of checking;
  - Utilities translating interfaces from one language to another;
  - Formalisms describing data, types, routine profiles, calling mechanisms,
      parameter passing and so on independently from any particular language;


What do you think ? Have you ever heard of any work on this field ?


Thank you for any suggestions.


J. Hulaas, Computer Dept, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne.
E-mail: hulaas@lcodec1.epfl.ch
[PL/I lets you declare that procedures are to use the linkage of other
languages such as Fortran or Cobol, though it's entirely implementation
dependent what actually happens. -John]
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